coreutils-7.7 beta release soon

[Jim Meyering]

I'd like to make a test release soon.  Maybe as soon as Friday.
If you have something that you'd like included, please speak up.

NEWS is already pretty long:

** Bug fixes

  cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
  when the source file doesn't have write access.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]

  touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
  to accommodate leap seconds.
  [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]

  ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
  when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]

** Portability

  On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
  file.  Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
  rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
  directory or a symlink to a directory.

** Changes in behavior

  id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
  environment variable is set.

  readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
  last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
  since mkdir will succeed in that case.

** Improvements

  rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
  This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
  cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.

  rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently.  Before, execution time
  was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
  However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
  very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
  length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
  avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty.  Leading to
  another improvement:

  rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
  write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.