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diff --git a/www/news.html b/www/news.html index ae1170ce..fadd8959 100755 --- a/www/news.html +++ b/www/news.html @@ -8,6 +8,117 @@ a development environment. See the links on the left for details.</p> <h2>News</h2> +<a name="21-02-2017" /><a href="#21-02-2017"><hr><h2><b>February 21, 2017</b></h2></a> +<blockquote><p>Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the +Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention +away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.</p> +<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> + +<p>Despite everything, <a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.3.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.3</a> +(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.3>git commit</a>) +is out. The <u>new commands</u> this time are <b>ftpget</b>, <b>ftpput</b>, <b>microcom</b>, and <b>ascii</b>.<p> + +<p>We also had two command _demotions_ out of defconfig: +<b>hostid</b> got moved to toys/example and +switched to "default n" because despite <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/gethostid.html>still being in posix</a> +the concept of a unique 32 bit number identifying a system is something +Linux outgrew about the time Pauline Middelink wrote the first IP +Masquerading code. And Elliott did a complete rewrite of <b>dmesg</b> introducing +two codepaths that I didn't get a chance to unify and didn't want to +hold up the release for, so that's back in pending.</p> + +<p><u>New features</u>: Rob added units to <b>find</b> -atime and friends +(with the legacy -amin alias). Elliott added color and -w to dmesg, fallocate +-o, and improved file's ELF parsing. Steve Muckle added -d and finit_module +support to modprobe. Rob and Elliott tweaked the +ps/top display format a bit more (extending the USER field from 8 to 18 chars +and putting + at the end of string fields that got truncated). +df -a isn't entirely new, but wasn't documented and needed a bugfix.</p> + +<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: +Last release broke oneit because -c didn't get moved to xopen_stdio() (oops). +Rob and Elliott simultaneously spotted ps padding each line to 99999 +chars when there's no tty (serial console or adb); now it pads to 80 in +that case but also switches on -w to avoid field truncation. The "tty" +field also sometimes had trailing debris (that's fixed now). And "top" was +endlessly redrawing with out tty because receipt of the ANSI size probe +results would set SIGWINCH, and handling that sent another ansi probe. (Sigh.) +And while we're there, replace "ADDR" with "BIT" in ps -l so there are +more than 4 chars left for the "CMD" field on 64 bit systems.</p> + +<p>Izabera pointed out that split -b and -l can't mix, and suggested seq should +multiply to avoid accumulating rounding errors from repeated fractional +increments. Wang Xiao Jian fixed a bug in sort -k. +Elliott let getprop use the @ character in property names, and +Dimitry Invaov removed the name length limit for system properties. +Elliott also improved some error reporting and improved top -H's display +of thread names. + +<p>Josh Gao pointed out that recursive operations on . and .. could be ignored +in chmod -R (and the resulting generic fix to dirtree_notdotdot() fixed +it in several other places).</p> + +<p>Justin Cormack caught tar producing a warning to stdout that screwed up +"tar c" to stdout. +Rob fixed an option parsing bug (where switching off a --longopt in menuconfig +confused the parser), and another one where an option excluding itself +(ala "abc[-ab][!abc]" with "command -a -b") would segfault.</p> + +<p>There's some sort of gcc stack over-optimization bug where musl-libc's +version of vfork() doesn't get marked with attribute(returns_twice) so +stack varabiles in the same function after that get semi-randomly overwritten +when the optimizer decides to reclaim the space. So add the attribute +to the function the XVFORK() wrapper macro calls. (It's a nommu thing.)</p> + +<p>Fixed a couple variable size mismatch bugs that were only tested on 64 bit +(printf %x 64) or only tested on 32 bit (modprobe), removed some +unnecessary casts in stat.</p> + +<p>Continuing attempts to build under Android NDK brought up that posix +defines the global 'stdout' as a macro, which bionic turns into an array +member, but a function was using it as an argument name. (How that ever +worked in the AOSP build, I couldn't tell you, but the argument got +renamed anyway.)</p> + +<p>Several commits argued with clang's warning generation, eventually +settling on a variant of __attribute__((__shut_up__)).</p> + +<p>Android should no longer give spurious error messages +when you "ps -A | head" about EPIPE on output. (Older versions of bionic +set an error handler on SIGPIPE, but it shouldn't do that now. More recent +versions of adb set the SIGPIPE handler to SIGIGN instead of SIGDFL, +leading to write returning an error message instead of silently killing +the program. So we set it back to the default.)</p> + +<p><u>Docs</u>: +Removed website link to the gmane archive (which didn't survive gmane's +change of ownership). The FAQ now answers a _second_ question. (Woo!) +Some roadmap updates.</p> + +<p><u>Build tweaks</u>: +Upgraded "make install_airlock" target to only warn about missing +commands (unless $PEDANTIC is set) when it sets up the hermetic build +path. (The plan is still to implement everything but the toolchain +binaries in toybox, but in the meantime we're symlinking other stuff from +the $HOST that isn't ready yet. See +<a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a> for an example using +this.)</p> + +<p>Elliott and Rob continue to poke at building toybox with Android's NDK, +but it's a work in progress (<a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2016-December/008767.html>thread</a>). Various changes +removing libcutils dependencies and adding an selinux dependency to getprop +are fallout from this.</p> + +<p>Cross-compiling from Macs needs to use "gsed" instead of apple's +version, so teach the build to use that name if it exists in the $PATH. +If you try to build without running config first, you should get better +error reporting now. Added a workaround for Centos' broken "which" command +producing output when it _can't_ find a name in the $PATH.</p> + +<p><u>Library</u>: +The new dirtree flag DIRTREE_PROC skips non-numeric entries so things +like ps and top can scan /proc more efficiently.</p> + <a name="21-10-2016" /><a href="#21-10-2016"><hr><h2><b>October 21, 2016</b></h2></a> <blockquote><p>Probability factor of one to one. We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your |