findutils-4.5.4 is released

[James Youngman]

I am pleased to announce the release of version 4.5.4 of GNU
findutils.

GNU findutils is a set of software tools for finding files that match
certain criteria and for performing various operations on them.
Findutils includes the programs "find", "xargs" and "locate".  More
information about findutils is available at
http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/.

This is a "development" release of findutils.  It can be downloaded from
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/findutils.  The 4.5.x release series is
intended to allow people to try out, comment on or contribute to new
features of findutils.  During the 4.5.x release series some features
may be introduced and then changed or removed as a result of feedback
or experience.  In short, please don't rely on backward compatibility
later in the release series.

While this is a development release, it is tested before being
released, principally with the regression test suite (run "make check"
to use it).  The Savannah website
(http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=findutils) contains a current
list of known bugs in findutils (for both the stable and development
branches).

Bugs in GNU findutils should be reported to the findutils bug tracker
at http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=findutils.  Reporting bugs via
the web interface will ensure that you are automatically informed when
the bug has been fixed.  General discussion of findutils takes place
on the bug-findutils mailing list.  To join the 'bug-findutils'
mailing list, send email to <address@hidden>.

To verify the GPG signature of the release, you will need the public
key of the findutils maintainer, James Youngman.  You can download
this from http://savannah.gnu.org/users/jay.  Please note that the key
being used is not the same as the key that was used to sign previous
releases.


* Major changes in release 4.5.4, 2009-03-10

** Performance changes

The ftsfind executable (which is built by default as "find") now calls
fts() in such a way that it avoids calling stat() on directory
entries, if it doesn't need the information.  This can produce a
significant speedup on filesystems which don't populate the d_type
element of struct dirent, for example reiserfs.  Anecdotal evidence
suggests this can speed updatedb up from about 30 minutes to 3-4
minutes.

The ftsfind executable also now avoids calling stat() functions to
discover the inode number of a file, if we already read this
information from the directory.  This does provide a speed-up, but
only for a restricted set of commands such as "find . -inum 4001".
This fix is listed below as bug #24342.

** Bug Fixes

#25764: remove duplicate entry for 'proc' in updatedb's $PRUNEFS.

#25359: find -H wrongly behaves like -L sometimes; this bug affects
only filesystems which populate d_type and affects -type and -printf
%y.   This does not affect the default behaviour of find or find -P.

#25144: Misleading error message when argument to find -user is an
unknown user or is missing.

#25154: Allow compilation with C compilers that don't allow
declarations to follow statements.

#24342: -inum predicate shoud use dirent.d_ino instead of stat.st_ino
(this is a performance bug).

** Translations

Updated translations for Bulgarian, German, Irish, Hungarian,
Lithuanian, Dutch, Polish, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukranian,
Vietnamese.

** Documentation Changes

The file README-CVS has been renamed to README-hacking and improved.