Re: coreutils-5.94 imminent

[Phillip Susi]

Shouldn't it be made consistent?  IMHO, the command "mv a b/" means move 
the file or directory named a into the directory named b, so if b does 
not exist or is not a directory, it should fail.  If you want to make mv 
deviate from this behavior, then at least shouldn't it behave the same 
on all platforms, without depending on the implementation of rename()?

Jim Meyering wrote:
> Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:
> > According to Jim Meyering on 2/9/2006 1:56 AM:
> > > I'm hoping to release coreutils-5.94 soon.  If anyone sees
> > > something on the trunk that they want but that's not yet
> > > in 5.94, please speak up now.  So far, my policy has been
> > > to apply only bug fixes.
> > Whatever happened to this thread:
> > http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2005-11/msg00285.html
>
> Thanks for bringing that up.
> In spite of saying I wanted to fix it for 5.94, I decided to let it wait.
> The probable fix and tests seem complicated/risky enough that I'd prefer
> to release 5.94 now.  For example, the tests will have to be dependent
> on how rename works, and will have to ensure that e.g.,
>
>   rm -rf a b; touch a; mv a b/
>
> still fails on systems with a rename syscall that honors trailing slashes.
>
> I'd rather see such changes made to the trunk first,
> and get some exposure through a test release.
>
> Besides, no one volunteered to do the work ;-)
> The code changes are trivial.  Writing tests and changing
> documentation will take more time.
> The fact that changing this part of mv induces no failure (on Linux)
> in the test suite is a sure indication we need more tests.