Findutils maintainer to be unresponsive until 24 August

[James Youngman]

Hello,

I've recently been accumulating small bugfixes to findutils with the
expectation of making a findutils-4.2.25 release.  The changes that
have yet to be released are:-

| * Major changes in release 4.2.25-CVS
| 
| ** Bug Fixes
| 
|    find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
|    owner or group) now works.  Previously there was a bug which
|    caused this to be treated as "find -perm 440".
| 
|    Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid
|    problems on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on
|    the basis of upper/lower case distinctions.
| 
|    The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file
|    regexprops.texi.
| 
| ** Other Changes
| 
|    The test suite for find is now much more extensive.

Also, the 4.2.24 release was to alpha.gnu.org only and so a "stable"
release to ftp.gnu.org would also make available the following
changes:-

| * Major changes in release 4.2.24
| 
| ** Documentation Changes
| 
| The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
| the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
| tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.
| 
| The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
| now documented.
| 
| We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
| and -okdir don't steal find's input.  Find does this by redirecting
| the command's standard input from stdin.
| 
| Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
| were contributed by Aaron Hawley.
| 
| ** Functional Changes
| 
| *** Functional changes in locate
| 
| The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
| be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
| changed with the new option --regextype.  This is a change from the
| existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
| Since this featrue is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
| useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
| find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
| locate.
| 
| The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
| controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
| This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
| equivalent.
| 
| *** Functional changes in find
| 
| The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
| the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
| have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
| recommended practice however).
| 
| The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
| that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
| a newline.
| 
| The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
| "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
| "-noleaf" on all find command lines.  This is useful for systems
| having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
| the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
| HSFS implementation).
| 
| ** Bug Fixes
| 
| *** Bug Fixes for find
| 
| The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
| re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
| gnulib version of this function).
| 
| find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
| expressions.
| 
| If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
| longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.
| 
| If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
| optimisation is now disabled for that directory.  This should allow
| searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
| don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
| Unix filesystems.   Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
| have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
| required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.
| 
| The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's
| idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
| "-printf %Y %y" now works properly.  This is Savannah bug #13973.

Of course this all sounds good, but I am about to go on vacation for a
week and a half (departing on Sunday and returning on 24 August).  I
could make a 4.2.25 release before going on vacation or after I
return.  While I am on vacation I will definitely be unable to access
the CVS repository and will probably be unable to read or answer
email.

Is anybody so keen to get their hands on these changes that they can't
wait until I get back from my vacation for a release?  The time effort
of making the release is trivial, it's just that I won't be available
to resolve any immediate problems.

TIA for any comments.

Regards,
James.