Re: 02-distclean-test.diff

[Jim Meyering]

Alexandre Duret-Lutz <address@hidden> wrote:
>  Derek> See below.  Also, do you prefer prepended NEWS, appended NEWS, or does
>  Derek> new NEWS just go wherever it looks best?
>
> Presently the order is random.  If you or someone else have a
> preference I'll be happy to follow it.

FYI, I think it's worthwhile to categorize NEWS entries,
and recently began doing so for the coreutils.
E.g., here's what I have for the next test release:

=======================================================================
GNU coreutils NEWS                                    -*- outline -*-
* Major changes in release 5.0.1:

** New features
- head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
  N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
- md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
  MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
- date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003

** Bug fixes
- tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
  delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing.  That
  bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
- du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
- df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
  non-glibc, non-solaris systems
- `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
- readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
  lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
- mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
  This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
  nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
- date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
- date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
  conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
- fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
- fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
- tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
  as required by POSIX.  Before, it would act as if the final token
  appeared one additional time.

** Fewer arbitrary limitations
- tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
  Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
- split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.

** Portability
- `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
  like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
- stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
- sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
- rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
  Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
  if there were more than 338.