# HG changeset patch # User Rob Landley # Date 1398021739 18000 # Node ID 4ac301cfb0474ef01e7eab53f776780f8b57ca1a # Parent fff90cae14c5934463f032a3eb63517c45d86445 Release announcement for 0.4.8. diff -r fff90cae14c5 -r 4ac301cfb047 www/news.html --- a/www/news.html Sun Apr 20 13:38:07 2014 -0500 +++ b/www/news.html Sun Apr 20 14:22:19 2014 -0500 @@ -7,6 +7,93 @@ a development environment. See the links on the left for details.

News

+ +
April 20, 2014 +

And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer +which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks +had been connected up it had started from "I think therefore I am" and got as +far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to +turn it off. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

+ +

Toybox 0.4.8 is based on +commit 1262. And +about time too.

+ +

The big news is that the build no longer needs python to generate help.h, +that's now done in C. The help text generation is also collating help text +from multiple options, merging command line option blocks and usage: lines. +There's even a new help web page.

+ +

New commands: Ifconfig, cpio, and su were cleaned up the rest of the +way and promoted out of pending. That saga is mostly explained on the +cleanup page. Vivek Bhagat's freeramdisk, +Isaac Dunham's fsfreeze, and Felix Janda's iconv are also new.

+ +

In pending: +Ashwini Sharma's team submitted tcpsvd, udpsvd, telnet, telnetd, last, more, +groupdel/delgroup, arping, brctl, ftpget, ftpput, printf, reset, and added +ipv6 support to traceroute. Kyungwan Han's team submitted modprobe and getty. +Vivek Bhagat submitted openvt and deacllocvt. Samuel Holland submitted fold. +I wrote a new inflate (zip/zlib/gzip decompression) implementation in +compress.c, and still need to do a corresponding deflate (compression-side) +and plug them into gzip and zip and so on. (Right now it does zcat.)

+ +

Several commands (vmstat, login, du, vconfig, mountpoint, free, chroot, +cut, touch, modinfo, expand) predate the "pending" directory, and are thus +in other directories but still need cleanup. Of these, vmstat got some +work this time (which would be much easier other vmstat implementations +documented what their output actually meant).

+ +

Upgrades: Ifconfig grew /prefix netmask support (ala 1.2.3.4/24). Grep now has -zZ to +handle null terminated data, cksum grew -H for hex output. Upgraded od so the +fields align better when producing multiple output types. Help has -a and -h +options (all commands, html output). +Bugfix to blkid building for a 32 bit target. The date command can actually +set dates now. The O_NOFOLLOW compile time probe didn't work with cross +compiling, so it's back to an #ifdef test in portability.h. Nathan McSween +sent in a bugfix to od and a portability fix in the common library code. +Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in pidof -o, and added verbose (-v) options +to mkdir and ln, and suggested killall should have an -s option and +allow -l to take zero arguments. Ashwini Sharma and Felix Janda upgraded +tftpd. Fixed dumpleases still using toynet.h after +that was removed. Corrected killall return code and error reporting. +Isacc Dunham fixed bugs all over the tree, did cleanup on a bunch of +pending commands (getty, ftpget, init, openvt, modprobe...), and clarified +find's help text. Tom Sparrow ran three different static analyzers on +the code, which resulted in a few cleanups. The peek()/poke() functions +now use "volatile" to prevent broken compiler "optimizations" to do with +aliasing.

+ +

Build stuff: Each FOR_xxxx macro now has a complementary CLEANUP_xxxx macro, so you +can put multiple commands with different command line options in the same +.c file, so they can share infrastructure outside of lib. (This let the +bunzip logic move out of lib into bzcat.c.) See XXX for example. +i +

The headers #included in toys.h are now grouped by standard, and headers +not listed in Posix or LSB were moved to portability.h. The old xregcomp.h +was folded into lib.h because it's posix (and supporting oddball uClibc +configurations isn't as important as it once was).

+ +

Regression tested against Ubuntu 8.04 to fix up bit-rot in defconfig +build on older systems. (We depend on Posix-2008, but not necessarily +the absolute latest build environment.)

+ +

In lib: lib/xwrap.c added xgetpwnam(), xchroot(), and lib/lib.c now has names_to_pid(). +xsetuid() was replaced with xsetuser() which takes a struct passwd +and sets both gid and uid, mkpathat() got factored out into a library command, +get_int_value() became atolx_range(), and +xmsprintf() is now just xmprintf(). The bunzip2 logic moved from lib into +bzcat.c.

+ +

Documentation: new help page with the +help text for all the defconfig commands, using the new help -ah output. +The source code walkthrough now says more about +#including header files, and how the generated/* directory works. The +design page has some new paragraphs about trading +of different kinds of simplicity, and why comments aren't a substitute for +good code. The README no longer trails off into obvious unfinished confusion +at the end. Each page on the website should now have its own title.

+
November 18, 2013

"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the street to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.