It's been 5 months since coreutils-8.5, and the list of NEWS entries is long enough that I think we'd do well to make a release. I've included those entries below.
Other than the imminent fix for tr's assert-on-invalid-inputs bug, is there anything people would like to see included? FIEMAP copy does not seem close enough, and even if it were complete, I'd want it to get more exposure before putting it in a release. --------------------------------------- * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?] ** Bug fixes du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by following symlinks or via multiple arguments. du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks. tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3] ** New features cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data, which is useful for efficiently modifying files. du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility with FreeBSD. sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options. sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination. stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point for a file. ** Changes in behavior df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file, rather than its aliased target. du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change. ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles. [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1] sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision. sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all zeros to be equal. sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be limited with the --parallel option or with external process control like taskset for example. stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r) instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1. truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file. Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and relative sizes are restricted to supported file types. * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable] ...
