Subject: bug#27368: Minor concern: Confusing tail warning

From: Jim Meyering <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2017 07:35:45 -0700

On Sat, Jun 17, 2017 at 1:32 AM, Pádraig Brady <[email-masked]> wrote:
...
> Two proposed patches for this are attached.

Nice fixes. Thank you!

In the NEWS addition:

   tail -f will now exit immediately if the output is piped
   and the reader of the pipe terminates.

+  tail -f will no longer erroneously warn about being ineffective
+  when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
+  is effective in this case.

Please don't use "will" in these blurbs.
I.e., use the present tense instead. Referencing the future makes
sense only now, prior to the release.

   tail -f now exits immediately when the output is piped
   and the reader of the pipe terminates.

   tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
   when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
   is effective in this case.

   tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by avoiding inotify when any
   non regular file is specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
   [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]

----------------------
In this new function, please move the declaration of "i" into the for-loop:

+static bool
+any_non_regular (const struct File_spec *f, size_t n_files)
+{
+  size_t i;
+
+  for (i = 0; i < n_files; i++)