Subject: Re: bug#34199: closed (Re: bug#34199: Small bug in cp (for win64))

From: Bob Proulx <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2019 15:17:39 -0700

Chris Kalish wrote:
> Hmmm ... not sure of the distribution, but the help file pointed me at this
> address:

> C:\> cp --version
> cp (GNU coreutils) 5.3.0

I always hate it when I am on your side of things and upstream says
this to me.  But here I am on the other side and going to say almost
exactly the thing I hate to hear.

Coreutils 5.3.0 was released on 2005-01-08 and today is 2019-02-10
making that version of the program you are running 14 years old!  That
is a very long time ago.  Since you are running on MS-Windows I will
say that was probably five whole versions of Microsoft ago!  It would
not be practically possible for most of us to recreate that version on
MS-Windows-XP of that era.  This makes it difficult to impossible to
do anything about even if we had an alive build system from 2005 still
running.  Plus here we are concerned about software on free(dom)
licensed platforms and Microsoft is a closed source proprietary
platform.  That was always supported by other teams doing ports to
non-free operating systems.  What's a developer to do? :-(

Perhaps I should ignore all of the years and simply say, yes, that is
a bug.  (I don't really know.  But I will say it.  Searching the
changelogs will show that 5.3.0 did introduce a number of bugs.)  And
we have fixed it!  The new version is v8.30 and that bug is fixed.
Eric reported that it was not a problem for Cygwin on MS-Windows.
Please upgrade to it and confirm with us that it is working for you
there.  Maybe that would be a less unpleasant to hear? :-)

> C:\> cp --help
> Report bugs to <[email-masked]>.

We are happy to have bugs reported here.  But often in ports the
behavior is dependent upon the port environment.  That is outside of
our control.

Please do upgrade to a newer version.  Cygwin tends to be the most
capable version.  Although there are other ports too.  We would
appreciate hearing about how this worked out for you regardless.

And maybe along the way you might consider upgrading to a free(dom)
software licensed operating system?  Then you would have upgrades
available by default. :-)

Bob