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diff --git a/www/news.html b/www/news.html index 12638815..b820d52a 100755 --- a/www/news.html +++ b/www/news.html @@ -8,6 +8,157 @@ a development environment. See the links on the left for details.</p> <h2>News</h2> +<hr><b>October 2, 2014</b> +<blockquote><p>"There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. +The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss... +Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the +difficulties." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.<p></blockquote> + +<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.0</a> +(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1512>commit 1512</a>) is out.</p> + +<h3>New commands</h3> + +<p>The new commands are find, install, factor, and mount. Promoted commands +(cleaned up and moved out of "pending") are lspci, inotifyd, and blockdev.</p> + +<p>cp now implements -HL and -F to force delete of pending files, cpio now +ignores -m and implements -p, ls -C now has utf8 support (using wcwidth +instead of strlen), and umount got a number of upgrades involving +looking things up in /proc/mounts. Other minor cleanups happend to +cut, touch, free, and id.</p> + +<p>In pending: Bradley Controy submitted mix (adjusts OSS sound volume). Ashwini +Sharma submitted diff, userdel, blockdev, ipcs, and crond, upgraded +fdisk, fsck, and ftpget, and ran a static analyzer on a lot of other code. +Partial cleanup was done to useradd, userdel, groupadd, and groupdel.</p> + +<h3>Build infrastructure</h3> + +<p><b>Parallel builds</b></p> + +<p>The build now takes advantage of SMP, autodetecting the number of +processors. (Export the environment variable CPUS to pick a specific number.) +Other build changes: split out $LDOPTIMIZE because old compilers complain +about linker options passed with -c, and the entire "generated" directory now +gets deleted by clean (the README that was in there got merged into code.html).</p> + +<p><b>Standalone builds</b></p> + +<p>The standalone build infrastructure (scripts/single.sh) got upgraded to +build more commands as standalone executables. In make.sh the source file +selection uses a regex to find the source files with the NEWTOY/OLDTOY macro +for the command. It enables each command's +sub-options (so CP has CP_MORE), enables I18N and FLOAT support to build +full-featured commands, and includes --help text (at least when +the command doesn't use another command's help). The OLDTOY() macro +now produces (redundant) function prototypes so you can build an OLDTOY +without the NEWTOY</p> + +<p>It doesn't quite have complete coverage yet, the defconfig entries that +aren't building standalone yet are:</p> + +<blockquote><p>chown, egrep, fgrep, fstype, halt, mv, nc, poweroff, unix2dos, +whoami</p></blockquote> + +<p>The main reason for standalone build failures is NEWTOY() or OLDTOY() +entries that don't have their own config symbol. Another problem is entries +that depend on another entry in kconfig, usually because common infrastructure +is using one command's flags (which the other commands copy): if that command +is disabled, the FLAG macros become 0 so dead code elimination can remove the +code. It's <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/1503>possible +to untangle</a> this, but a bit awkward. (It boils down to conflicting +design goals in the two contexts.)</p> + +<p>Standalone builds are used by the test suite when testing individual +commands. + +<p><b>Snapshot builds</b></p> + +<p>A new addition to the "generated" directory is generated/build.sh +containing a single compiler command line to build toybox in its current +configuration. Combined with the generated/*.{h,sh} files from an +exisiting build, this may let you build on a new system that hasn't quite +got enough OS bits working to run a full configureand make.</p> + +<h3>Internals</h3> + +<p>Library code: xcreate/xopen now O_CLOEXEC by default to avoid leaking +filehandles to child processes. DIRTREE_COMEAGAIN's second callback is now +done with the directory filehandle still open (new dir->again variable added +to distinguish first from second callback, and requesting DIRTREE_RECURSE now +requires passing in the specific macro value, not just a true/false). +Use daemon() out of libc instead of hand-rolled daemonize() in various +pending commands. string_to_mode() now passes through type bits so you can +use it to more easily modify a file's existing mode. +Split xpopen() into xpopen_both(), xopen(), and xrun() depending on whether +we want to redirect both, one, or neither of stdin/stdout.</p> + +<p>Bugfixes: Better error message when TOYBOX_SUID option can't drop priviliges +(which happens when you suid something _other_ than root). +The old pending version of nbd_client.c wasn't deleted when the +command was promoted (and the build would break if both were enabled), +toy_exec() sometimes needs to re-exec from $PATH rather than recurse +internally (to gain dropped root permissions or limit stack depth), +always call setlocale() when I18N is enabled to switch it back _off_ when +we run commands that expect sscanf("%n") to return bytes, +dirtree() had a memory leak in an error path, patch.c had some bugs in +error paths (didn't report problem clearly). Ashwini Sharma spotted an +option parsing bug where [-abc] would forget _all_ command line arguments +saved in the GLOBALS() block (not just the ones for options being switched +off), plus various minor fixes to nbd_client and cpio. +Lukasz Szpakowski fixed rm -f on a broken symlink (failed), and killall +with no arguments (segfaulted).</p> + +<p><b>Portability</b></p> + +<p>A somewhat fiddly fix to rm -rf (which needs to chmod directories to u+rwx +to descend into them) which hit a musl bug in faccessat() which the musl +maintainer refuses to fix. (He literally wants the man page changed +instead, despite other libcs working.) Added an #ifdef __MUSL__ section +to portability.h with a workaround, you may need CFLAGS=-D__MUSL__ in your +build if your musl build's features.h doesn't #define that. (I may do +a different workaround in future, but sometimes you've just got to make +it work so you can ship. Also, toybox grep with multiple patterns +requires <a href=http://landley.net/hg/aboriginal/rev/1692>a patch +to musl's regex engine</a>, which applies to 1.1.4 but not to the current +musl source control.)</p> + +<p>More portability.h fixes for uClibc too. (I don't expect that to ever have +another release, so locally patching around posix-2008 violations is silly).</p> + +<p><b>Change to username filtering</b></p> + +<p>Posix recommends the username creation logic filter usernames to a small +allowed set of characters (which even Red Hat breaks by explicitly allowing +"$" at the end), but this prevents UTF-8 usernames. Posix' stated logic +is to allow filesystems to create the user's home directory, but Linux +filesystems can accept any character but NUL and "/". The only characters +we actually _need_ to filter out are ":" (field separator in passwd), +newline (line separator in passwd), and "/" (directory separator in +filesystem).</p> + +<h3>Documentation</h3> + +<p>Web pages updated: cleanup.html documents more cleanup, code.html +documents more code, and about.html now capitalizes "toybox" consistently +(it's just a word, capitalize at start of sentence).</p> + +<p>The pending/README file now lists commands that needed review/cleanup +before the pending directory was added.</p> + +<h3>Test Suite</h3> + +<p>Moved out of scripts/test into top level "tests" directory, and the +testing.sh script is now in scripts rather than mixed into the *.test files.</p> + +<p>Johan Bergström requested VERBOSE=fail to make tests (telling it to +stop at the first failure), and spotted a build bug where using gnu +sort on the host broke in non-C locales.</p> + +<p>Divya Kothari submitted tests for chmod, link, tar, bzcat, xzcat, zcat, +and hostname. (And more, but that's all that's merged so far.)</p> + <hr><b>July 7, 2014</b> <blockquote><p>"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many |