Re: Student contribution

[Desirée Zahradnicek]

It's true that this functionality can be achieved very easily with a
simple script, but the point is that it being so useful it's a letdown
that it isn't incorporated already, and so people that needs it have
to go creating/googling a solution. I know it's much more work to have
it built in, and that as with all modifications there's always the
risk of breaking something, but on the plus side I'll be the one doing
the work, and as it adds an optional functionality it's not expected
to cause trouble if not used.

What do you say, do we give it a shot?

2017-05-08 9:08 GMT-03:00 Pádraig Brady <address@hidden>:
> On 07/05/17 15:58, Desirée Zahradnicek wrote:
>> Hi, mi name is Desirée Zahradnicek and I'm in the last year of
>> Information Systems Engineering. As a requirement for subject called
>> Free Software I have to make a contribution to a free software
>> project, and I thought about contributing to coreutils.
>> I have a small but useful idea in mind, I'm thinking about adding an
>> option to the program "tail" to make it print the last lines of a file
>> filling the terminal height. I think this could be very useful on its
>> own and more so in combination with watch. I created a really small
>> shell script to emulate the functionality:
>>
>> #!/bin/bash
>> nlines=$(( $(tput lines) - 2 ))
>> tail -$nlines $1
>>
>> I'm writing to ask if you think this could be included so I can start
>> to work on it.
>
> Thanks for considering coreutils!
> As for this particular functionality, it definitely _is_ useful.
> I myself use this alias:
>
>   alias tail='tail -n $((${LINES:-12}-2))'
>
> However considering the relatively simple alias to achieve this functionality
> it's probably better to not couple that within tail itself.
>
> Would you perhaps consider some other coreutils patch?
> For example it would be useful for `sort --debug` to print extra info.
>  1. print memory space available.
>    I.E. allocated internal buffer sizes and space avail at $TMPDIR(s)
>  2. output if locale is specific to the sort.
>    I.E. if strcoll() and memcmp() differ in direction
>
> cheers,
> Pádraig.