GNU bug report logs - #27368
Minor concern: Confusing tail warning

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Message #16 received at 27368 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Jim Meyering <jim <at> meyering.net>
To: 27368 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, Pádraig Brady <P <at> draigbrady.com>, 
 charlie.hagedorn <at> gmail.com
Cc: 27368-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#27368: Minor concern: Confusing tail warning
Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2017 07:35:45 -0700

On Sat, Jun 17, 2017 at 1:32 AM, Pádraig Brady <P <at> draigbrady.com> 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++)

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