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Update news page for the past two releases.
author Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
date Mon, 25 Jun 2012 06:42:24 -0500
parents b93517f238d1
children ba40e1852ce8
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1 <!--#include file="header.html" --> 1 <!--#include file="header.html" -->
2 2
3 <h2>See <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> for current and planned
4 command list.</h2>
5
6 <h2>News</h2> 3 <h2>News</h2>
4 <hr><b>June 25, 2012</b>
5 <blockquote><p>"For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
6
7 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.3.1</a> is based on commit
8 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/607>commit 607</a>. It's
9 mostly a bugfix release for ls -l (which was unhappy on targets other than
10 x86-64), plus a new "date" from Andre Renaud and rewritten chgrp/chown which
11 now support the full set of posix flags, plus a little work on the test
12 suite and some more header tweaks towards eventual compatability with the
13 musl libc.</p>
14
15 <p>The todo list runneth over, but "release early, release often", so here
16 it is. The roadmap and documentation are a bit behind, and I've got ~40
17 pending submissions to review. I need to catch up...</p>
18 </span>
19
20 <hr><b>June 12, 2012</b>
21 <blockquote><p>"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that
22 he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the
23 wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was
24 muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had
25 always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely
26 the same reasons." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
27
28 <p>It's well past time for <a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.0.tar.bz2>toybox 0.3.0</a>,
29 so here it is, based
30 on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/595>commit 595</a>, and the
31 statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt binaries</a> should
32 actually be statically linked this time (thanks Ashwini Sharma for spotting
33 that).</p>
34
35 <p>It's hard to figure out where to cut a release, because development
36 doesn't stop. "Long before now" is the obviuos answer, of course.
37 The project's maintainer also moved house during this development cycle, which
38 threw things off for a bit (so many boxes). Releases should hopefully be a bit
39 more frequent from here on.</p>
40
41 <p>The big things Rob worked on this time were the new dirtree (directory
42 tree traversal) infrastructure, and a complete rewrite of ls using that
43 which should now implement all 26 posix options.</p>
44
45 <p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski added printenv, whoami, mkdir, mkfifo, chmod, chown,
46 chgrp, and uniq. He also added fraction and extension support to sleep (so if
47 you need a quarter-second sleep, it can do that now), and fixed a build bug
48 on slackware.</p>
49
50 <p>Daniel Walter contributed a string to mode_t parser (in use by chmod and
51 mkdir -m). Ilya Kuzmich contributed comm. Elie De Brauwer added mountpoint,
52 vmstat, logname, login, and mktemp. Kevin Chase did some portability cleanups.
53 Pere Orga fixed some documentation.</p>
54
55 <p>The "tac" and "clear" commands are now normal commands instead of shell
56 wrappers, and the header #includes have been cleaned up a bit to remove
57 deprecated functions and attempt to increase compatability with the bionic and
58 musl C libraries, "tail" should now use lseek() for large files, and "id" got
59 some cleanups and bugfixes.</p>
60
61 <p>The new TOYBOX_FLOAT configuration option selects whether or not
62 to include floating point support (for embedded targets where that's
63 problematic).</p>
64
65 <p>Several random bugfixes: unshare() might actually build portably now,
66 yes 'n' | cp -i should no longer bypass stdin and prompt via the tty, the
67 SUID support no longer drops permissions going through the toybox
68 multiplexer command, and a bugfix to xargs -0 means it should no longer
69 segfault. (I have a pending bug report about xargs not doing the full
70 posix whitespace handling that -0 obsoleted, but I'll deal with that next
71 release.)</p>
72
73 <p>The build infrastructure is now automatically generating FLAG_ macros
74 for the options, but currently with the wrong names. Some more macro glue
75 is necessary, which I haven't quite figured out how to do yet.</p>
76
77 <p>A defconfig toybox at the start of the $PATH has successfully built
78 Linux From Scratch (in my Aboriginal Linux project). The commands that
79 'default n' in the config are often still broken, cleanup is ongoing.
80 (The new dirtree stuff broke several of them that haven't been converted
81 yet, but if I wait until everything works we won't have a release before
82 1.0, so here's a checkpoint.)</p>
83
84
7 <hr><b>March 3, 2012</b> 85 <hr><b>March 3, 2012</b>
8 86
9 <blockquote><p>"They went unnoticed at Goonhilly, passed over Cape Canaveral 87 <blockquote><p>"They went unnoticed at Goonhilly, passed over Cape Canaveral
10 without a blip, and Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them. 88 without a blip, and Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them.
11 Which was a pity, because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking 89 Which was a pity, because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking