dircolors NEWS [Was: coreutils-5.90 released]

[Eric Blake]

Jim Meyering <jim <at> meyering.net> writes:

> 
> There have been many changes since the last release (unstable 5.3.0).
> So many that I feel 5.90 should also be considered unstable, at least
> initially.

There is no mention in NEWS about the additional colorization now available in 
ls and dircolors.  This needs to be fixed, because it has user-visible 
consequences:  I was surprised when my color highlighting of other-writable 
directories changed, even though my file parsed by dircolors had not.  I 
tracked it back to this change:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2005-09/msg00023.html

I wonder if ls should be providing default colors for file types that are not 
specified in the LS_COLORS environment variable.  For example, since my 
dircolors file was not edited in the course of my upgrade to 5.90, dircolors 
never sees the OWR keyword, and LS_COLORS does not have an ow= entry.  Yet, ls 
currently initializes ALL of its categories with defaults, then reads LS_COLORS 
and only overrides the categories specified in LS_COLORS.  Perhaps when 
LS_COLORS is specified, ls should not pre-initialize any of its categories, so 
that the only colors are those specified by LS_COLORS and not by ls's defaults.

--
Eric Blake