coreutils-8.10

[Gilles Espinasse]

part of the announce

This is to announce coreutils-8.10, a stable release.

There have been some minor bug fixes, along with two new features.  The
join feature is enabled via a new option, "-o auto".  The cp feature makes
copying sparse files much more efficient on several common file systems.
It takes advantage of a feature that was introduced in linux-2.6.27.
The improvement affects the default code path, so if you're looking
for risk potential, this is it.  It uses the feature if available,
and otherwise resorts to using the old, less-efficient copying code.

See NEWS below for a brief summary.

​http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.10.tar.gz (11MB) ​http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.10.tar.xz (4.6MB)

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
  part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
  directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
  argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]

  join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
  even if the other file is empty.  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]

  rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
  reject file names invalid for that file system.

  uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]

** New features

  cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
  support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2).  Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
  when copying a 1MiB sparse file.  Now, it copies bytes only for the
  non-sparse sections of a file.  Similarly, to induce a hole in the
  output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes.  Now,
  it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
  reproduce them efficiently in the output file.  mv also benefits
  when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.

  join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
  output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
  the same number of fields are output for each line.

** Changes in behavior

  join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
  This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
  join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null

[Gilles Espinasse]

One new test fail for me.

FAIL: cp/sparse-fiemap

I reported that issue.

[Gilles Espinasse]

Upstream fix for test failure

[Gilles Espinasse]

Attached patch from upstream fix a new test (mainly when the OS fs is ext3)

[bdubbs@…]

Fixed at revision 9460. I chose to not add the patch for the sparse file test because I can't reproduce the problem, but we may want to reconsider if we get additional problem reports.