savannah repository is once again in synch; coreutils-5.2.1 coming soon

[Jim Meyering]

The coreutils repository mirror on savannah.gnu.org is once again up to
date, and should be updated daily from now on.

Since the savannah security breach uncovered last year, I had been unable
to update that mirror, and so it has been stuck with the sources as of
Dec 3, 2003, prior to coreutils-5.1.0.

Now that a stable coreutils-5.2.0 has been released, I plan to make
a conservative 5.2.1 release soon, so if you know of any problems with
5.2.0, or with the few changes made since then, please report them ASAP.

Here are instructions for checking out the latest sources:

  http://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=coreutils

Here's the current list of NEWS entries for the upcoming coreutils-5.2.1.

----------------------
* Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-??) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
  descriptor.  This avoids some nohup-induced hangs.  For example, before
  this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
  and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
  10-minute sleep terminated.  With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
  terminates immediately.

  `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:

    Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.

    The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
    arguments are null or zero.  E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
    not the empty string.

    The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
    `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.

** New features

  `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
  conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
  containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.