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diff --git a/www/news.html b/www/news.html index 983884de..049c2991 100755 --- a/www/news.html +++ b/www/news.html @@ -1,18 +1,146 @@ <!--#include file="header.html" --> -<p>Toybox combines the most common Linux command line utilities together +<p>Toybox combines common Linux command line utilities together into a single BSD-licensed executable that's simple, small, fast, reasonably standards-compliant, and powerful enough to turn Android into a development environment. See the links on the left for details.</p> <h2>News</h2> +<hr><b>September 17, 2013</b> +<blockquote><p>"Think of a number," said the computer, "any number." +Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King's Cross railway +station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function, +and this might turn out to be it. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> +</blockquote> + +<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.6.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.6</a> is based on +<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1068>commit 1068</a>.</p> + +<p>This release adds +several new commands: Felix Janda wrote paste and fallocate, Kyungwan Han +submitted eject, Strake contributed grep, Ashwini Sharma added pmap (and +a testsuite entry for grep), Lukasz Skalski sent pwdx, Isaac Dunham posted +acpi, and I did timeout and umount.</p> + +<p>The ls command now has a --color=auto option (suggested by Rich Felker). +The multiplexer now has a --help option so you can say "./toybox --help blah" +instead of using the built-in "help" command. (Which is a shell built-in. +Try it on your command line, it's like man for shell builtins. But a certain +other project has conditioned people to expect --help, so...) I forget who +heehooman at gmail is but they pointed out unshare needed PID and UID +namespace support.</p> + +<h3>Pending</h3> + +<p>A lot of new commands in toys/pending, to the point the next release should +probably just focus on cleanup and review of this backlog. We've got klogd, +dhcp, dhcpd, watch, route, and ps from +Ashwini Sharma (and an fdisk wrapper but no fdisk.fstype engines yet), +syslogd, pgrep, and pkill from Madhur Verma, netstat by Ranjan Kumar, +test by Felix Janda, lspci by Isaac Dunham, nl, su, and renice by strake (I.E. +M. Farkas-Dyck), and sysvinit by Kyungwan Han.</p> + +<p>Some cleanup work on existing pending commands that aren't +ready to promote yet: I did a few more rounds on ifconfig +and Isaac Dunham's did several cleanups to xzcat, Felix Janda cleaned up +logger and syslogd...</p> + +<p>Also some cleanup work on commands that predate the pending directory, +but weren't quite polished when they went in, most prominently du, +expand, and touch.</p> + +<h3>Infrastructure</h3> + +<p>The new scripts/single.sh builds a standalone command without the +multiplexer, although not all commands can be built that way yet (NEWTOY yes, +OLDTOY no) and the space savings aren't anything to write home about. (If a +command needs the option parsing logic at all, it needs all of it.) If +you're curious, you can do:</p> + +<blockquote><pre> +make defconfig +make +mkdir singles +for i in $(./toybox) +do + echo $i + PREFIX=singles/ scripts/single.sh $i || break +done +</pre> +<p>(And then wait a long time and watch almost half the builds fail.)</p> +</blockquote> + +<p>There is now libbuf analogous to toybuf, another global 4k buffer this +time for use by lib/ code instead of command code.</p> + +<p>The lib directory got split up a bit, lib/pending.c contains functions +not yet used by anything outside of toys/pending/*, and lib/xwrap.c contains +functions that wrap other functions and handle failures (via error_exit). +This leaves lib/lib.c containing actual new functions.</p> + +<p>General improvements and bug fixes to argument parsing. The [-abc] exclude +logic should now clear arguments slots when disabling options. Bare --longopts +should work now and be able to report errors using their name, the new ; +option allows optional arguments to longopts only suppliable with = (I.E. +--color and --color=auto but not --color auto).</p> + +<p>I'm gradually weaning the code off of itoa()/utoa() because sprintf +does this already. In this case "simple" probably means "let libc do it +for us".</p> + +<p>Rewrote for_each_pid_with_name_in() and renamed it to just names_to_pid(). +It shouldn't get confused trying to compare absolute and relative paths quite +so much anymore.</p> + +<p>lib/llist.c grew a new dlist_pop() function for removing a doubly +linked list entry while maintaining a circular list; tail and patch are +using it now.</p> + +<p>The musl guys suggested a new optimization flag +(-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables) +that shaves about 10% off the binary size by removing a C++ism that crept +into gcc's idea of C. While I don't normally try to micromanage the compiler, +"-fstop-being-stupid" is a thing you have to hit gcc with from time to time.</p> + +<h3>Bugfixes</h3> + +<p>Felix Janda and I did a largeish rewrite of tail to +finally make it work right (we think). Still need to implement tail -f +someday (the tricky bit is making -f follow multiple files at once). +Felix also reported a bug in xpidfile.</p> + +<p>Juhani Haverinen pointed out that +python 3 doesn't work with config2help.py, so the detection logic looks +for python2 (until I get around to rewriting that in C). Elie De Brauwer +then fixed our first attempt at this, and also fixed uname's help string.</p> + +<p>Ashwini Sharma +pointed out the build was making a FLAG_ macro for " " which broke some +configurations. (That's a control character, not a command line option.)</p> + +<p>Jacek Bukarewicz pointed out a bug in chdir permission handling, and +a way to make env segfault. Both should be fixed now.</p> + +<p>The new function xexec_optargs() +replaces calls to xexec(toys.optargs) to avoid freeing and reusing optargs +during option parsing screwing stuff up (such as netcat's exec mode).</p> + +<p>The stat command's %a output was padded with leading zeroes, which +didn't match anybody else's behavior and thus made the test suite hiccup +between TEST_HOST and testing toybox. (If you go "TEST_HOST=1 scripts/test.sh +command" it sanity checks the tests against the host implementation.)</p> + +<p>Last release, "mkdir sub/sub && chmod 007 sub/sub && rm -rf sub" didn't +delete sub and didn't exit with an error either. Neither was correct, rm +should now be fixed.</p> + +<p> <hr><b>July 26, 2013</b> <p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski maintains a <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>git mirror</a> of the repository on github, automatically updated from the mercurial every 6 hours. The mirror is read only, but you can generate patches against it and post them to the list.</p> -<h2>News</h2> <hr><b>July 2, 2013</b> <blockquote><p>"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "Very deep. You should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people |