SoC 2009: BSD-licensed libiconv in base system

David Schultz das at FreeBSD.ORG
Tue Apr 28 22:25:55 UTC 2009


On Tue, Apr 28, 2009, Gabor Kovesdan wrote:
> Another idea to consider. Are all of our utilities wchar-clean? What 
> about library functions? (regex is surely not) Do we lack any important 
> utility or library? (we still do lack iconv and gettext and what 
> else...?) What about standards, like C99 wchar functions? Is there 
> something missing? What about POSIX if it has something related? 
> Personally, I think that these are more important questions than support 
> of some extremely rare languages. It's worth to consider how to deal 
> with them later but the basic problems need a higher priority.

There's a fair number of utilities that are not locale-aware, and
we don't have any of the *_l() functions in POSIX.1-2008.  There
are also some second-order issues in libraries, e.g., they assume
multibyte encodings don't contain embedded low ASCII characters,
or they are far less efficient than they could be.

> I hope my work will be useful for the community. Btw, I suspected that
> you might be interested in this and I wrote a mail personally to you
> when I was looking for a mentor. Then I didn't resend it because
> delphij@ volunteered to be my mentor. Have you ever got that mail? If
> you find this an interesting project your comments, review, etc. are
> still highly welcome.

I did reply on 3/19, basically to say that I'd be happy to offer
advice, but it's not really my area.


More information about the freebsd-hackers mailing list