(I'll send another email for the bug I found, instead of having 2 topics in 1 thread).
Does anyone look at the bug tracker on Savannah? https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?group=bash I submitted a bug there, after going to the GNU project page for bash http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/ and following the link to the Savannah page (https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/bash/). I now realize that nobody has ever closed any of the bugs there, even some obvious candidates for CLOSE WONTFIX. I did notice that Chet has replied to one a couple of these bugs, but didn't close any of them as invalid or wontfix. So I assume the bug tracker isn't really used. There have been some closed tickets on the patches page, so I guess someone looked at that page at least at some point. https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?group=bash I was going through some bugs looking for ones I could help triage, and found several that aren't actually bugs. I commented on them to explain why they weren't bugs or weren't necessary features, summarizing here. Hopefully this is of some use, if anyone decides to go an look over the savannah bug page. https://savannah.gnu.org/support/index.php?108381 CLOSE INVALID: POSIX says arithmetic is done with signed integers, so no, right shift is arithmetic (sign-extending) not logical, unfortunately. https://savannah.gnu.org/support/index.php?108163 probably invalid, pasting giant buffers into bash loses characters because of lack of pseudo tty flow control, not bash's fault. https://savannah.gnu.org/support/index.php?108103 CLOSE WONTFIX: md5 checking of possibly-updated-from-dropbox stuff can easily be done with wrapper scripts. (This one has a comment from someone other than the submitter, a guy that says he "really wants to help with some code", hopefully Jonathan Ganade found his way to a mailing list or otherwise found something to hack on.) https://savannah.gnu.org/support/index.php?107974 CLOSE WONTFIX, unless maybe you really really want to be able to do foo {$n..$m}"$tail" without needing an eval. Or to avoid having to bust out for (( i=n ; i<=m ; i+=k )) syntax. https://savannah.gnu.org/support/index.php?105519 CLOSE DONE: feature request for shopt -s autocd https://savannah.gnu.org/support/index.php?102985 CLOSE INVALID: contrary to the submitter's expectation, POSIX says printf %c takes a string, not a number. There are pure-bash implementations of chr and ord (to use the perl names) on http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/071. (Kudos Greg Wooledge for very excellent stuff.) Given that, any new features to help with this are probably not needed. The only odd thing I found while playing around with this is that printf %c only prints the first byte of the UTF-8 representation of a multi-byte character. (POSIX says to be "extremely cautious" about using %c with wide characters, apparently for good reason.) -- #define X(x,y) x##y Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cor , des.ca) "The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours! Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BC
