time-1.8 changes license and output

[Petr Pisar]

After many years a new 1.8 version of "time" tool was released. This
version brings some noticable changes:

(1) License changed from (GPLv2+) to (GPLv3+ and GFDL).

(2) Additional exit codes are used to report meassured command failures
and failures to execute the command.

(3) A meassured command failure is printed by default. See the first line:

$ ./time-1.8/time /usr/bin/false
Command exited with non-zero status 1
0.00user 0.00system 0:00.00elapsed 100%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 1196maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+55minor)pagefaults 0swaps

You can suppress the message by "-q" option:

$ ./time-1.8/time -q /usr/bin/false
0.00user 0.00system 0:00.00elapsed 100%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 1268maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+55minor)pagefaults 0swaps

I consider the last change quite significant. Vanilla time used to print
the failure message uncoditionally, but Fedora patched it to be visible
only if "-v" option was specified. But 1.8 started to control the
message by "-q" option. To follow the upstream, I dropped the patch.

This of course revealed that the failure message is printed by default
even in POSIX mode ("-p" option) now:

$ ./time-1.8/time -p /usr/bin/false
Command exited with non-zero status 1
real 0.00
user 0.00
sys 0.00

I think this is a bug and patched the tool not to print the message in
the POSIX mode either:

$ ./time-1.8/time -p /usr/bin/false
real 0.00
user 0.00
sys 0.00

I hope Fedora's time-1.8 won't disrupt your scripts so blatantly.

-- Petr

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Nov 08, 2017 at 05:06:11PM +0000, Petr Pisar wrote:
>  I hope Fedora's time-1.8 won't disrupt your scripts so
> blatantly. 
Let's land this in F28 (rawhide) and not update in F27. And make sure
it gets in the release notes.

-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
Fedora Project Leader

[Petr Pisar]

On 2017-11-08, Matthew Miller <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; wrote:
>  On Wed, Nov 08, 2017 at 05:06:11PM +0000, Petr Pisar wrote:
> > I hope Fedora's time-1.8 won't disrupt your scripts so blatantly.
>
>  Let's land this in F28 (rawhide) and not update in F27. And make sure
>  it gets in the release notes.
>  
Of course only F28 receives this upgrade.

The good thing is upstream accepted my patch and future upstream
releases won't print the command failure message in the POSIX mode
anymore.

I will file Fedora system-wide change, to get proper attention.

-- Petr