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diff --git a/www/news.html b/www/news.html index e4cc685d..12638815 100755 --- a/www/news.html +++ b/www/news.html @@ -8,6 +8,128 @@ a development environment. See the links on the left for details.</p> <h2>News</h2> +<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 +solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely +concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd +because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were +unhappy." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> + +<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.9.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.9</a> (<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1385>commit 1385</a>) is out.</p> + +<p><b>New commands</b> added to pending include: +lsattr, chattr, inotifyd, rfkill, sulogin, strings, makedevs, +killall5, and tar from Ashwini Sharma, arp from Kyungwan Han, +sysctl by Bilal Qureshi, partprobe from Bertold Van den Bergh, +host from Rich felker, and I did nbd-client and the first 2/3 of mount.</p> + +<p>Finished cleanups (commands promoted out of pending): +sysctl, rfkill, strings, mkpasswd, makedevs, partprobe, killall5, +fallocate, and nbd-client.</p> + +<p>(Along the way partial cleanups got made to: last, fold, lspci, ps, +bootchartd, init, fsck, telnetd, telnet, vconfig, toysh, iconv, useradd, +login, host, openvt, deallocvt, getty, tftpd, and modprobe. But there's +still more to do on all of those.)</p> + +<p>This time around the <a href=bin>static binaries</a> are linked against +musl instead of uClibc. (That's why there's no sparc version, musl doesn't +support that target yet.)</p> + +<p><b>Documentation:</b></p> + +<p>The help text parser expects lower case "usage:" lines with +a blank line after them, so go through and regularize those. Expand the +"coding style" section in the docs and move it to design.html. (Not a show +stopper for incoming +contributions, just an explanation of some of the things I'll do to them +during cleanup.) The help text for the "toybox" command now includes +the shell script snippet to install symlinks to the toybox binary.</p> + +<p>The <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a> now has descriptions for the +full ifconfig cleanup series, among others.</p> + +<p>The new toys/examples directory contains hello.c and skeleton.c. The first is +a simple hello world program in toybox style, the second is a much more +elaborate example program using showing how to use the command line option +parsing and how to provide multiple commands in the same C file.</p> + +<p><b>Fixes</b>:</p> + +<p>Fix od bug reported by Samuel Holland ("od -v -b" was appending the default +output type even though an output type was specified). Ashwini Sharma reported +bugs where readfile() was incorrectly freeing its buffer, and where toy_init() +was zeroing the wrong data because the field it was using to measure (rebound) +had moved (when I moved it back I added a comment why the field needs to be +there), fixed a segfault in the dhcp client, and made a 0 length read at +the start of password entry count as EOF. Make the "we are not root" test +in the init code show the help text. Posix implies that fflush() can return +success even when the stream's error bit is set, so call both fflush() and +ferror() from xprintf().</p> + +<p>Isaac Dunham pointed out that bloatcheck couldn't deal with diff +implementations that only implement "unified diff" format, and that some +diff implementations can't handle nonseekable input (I.E. reading from +a pipe). Bugfix so "help -a" works again. Option parsing on nohup now stops +at first nonoption argument. Fix segfault in "which" if PATH wasn't set, +which was actually a bug in lib function find_in_path(). Made rm -rf of +chmod 000 directories actually remove them.</p> + +<p>The build now passes the same $CFLAGS to the library probe as the final +build, because arch linux is so broken it provides different sets of +libraries for static and dynamic linking.</p> + +<p>It turns out sprintf("%.123s", str) is counting characters, not bytes, +so globally enabling locale support opens stack smashing vulnerabilities. +So there's a new TOYFLAGS_LOCALE you set in toyflags when you want the +setup code to setlocale().</p> + +<p><b>Upgrades:</b></p> + +<p>Isaac Dunham extended cpio to archive unreadable empty files, and I taught it +to set uid/gid and timestamp when extracting archives. Isaac also +added tests for cpio, link, and du, added lspci -i, made the pci database +parsing skip # comment lines, merged logname and whoami into id.</p> + +<p>Daniel Verkamp sped up md5sum about 30% with some loop unrolling, making +it actually smaller in the process. I added -b flags to md5sum and sha1sum +for "brief" output that's just the hash with no filename. (I'm aware other +implementations use that for MSDOS "binary" mode, and don't care.)</p> + +<p>When building standalone commands (scripts/singleconfig.sh commandname), +the build now switches on all the sub-options of the command so we get +a standalone version with all the bells and whistles enabled.</p> + +<p>Add -ds flags to date and document +FORMAT escapes. Add the shell NOP +command ":" as an alias for true (for toysh).</p> + +<p>Add uClibc probe for iconv() and fallocate. (The fact it didn't always +build against uClibc is why fallocate wasn't enabled in defconfig before.)</p> + +<p>The umount command now does an losetup -d on the device by default, so +we don't leak loopback devices. Bugfix to losetup so "losetup /dev/loop0 +filename" actually works again.</p> + +<p>Divya Kothari sent in test suite entries for ls, ln, rm, mv, printf, dd, +and renice. Then a second round for lsattr/chattr, mount, chmod, pgrep/pkill, +groupadd, groupdel, and useradd. Several of these uncovered bugs, still +working to fix them.</p> + +<p>There are now free() functions for the predefined llist types and a +dlist_terminate() function to break doubly linked lists. The new +generic_signal() handler either sets "toys.signal" or writes a byte +to toys.signalfd with the signal number if signalfd isn't -1 (which it's +initialized to in toy_init).</p> + +<p>The option parsing logic can now detect when a double fits in a long and +use the more precise type for floating point arguments (the FLOAT macro +contains the type used). The human_readable() function now just outputs +decimal kilo/mega/gigabytes (so when du -u says 5.0G it means 5.0 billion +bytes). The build infrastructure now notices duplicate commands (so if you +cp toys/pending/command.c toys/other/command.c and forget to delete the +first one, the build break is now more informative).</p> + <hr><b>April 20, 2014</b> <blockquote><p>And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks |