Re: FreeBSD awk behavior change proposal

> Greetings,
> 
> I've posted  https://reviews.freebsd.org/D31114 which eliminates the last
> delta we have from upstream one-true-awk. This delta has basically been
> rejected by upstream as being a really bad idea. Let me give some
> background.
> 
> In 2005, FreeBSD changed one-true-awk to honor the locale's collating order.
> https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/awk/b.c.diff?annotate=146322&pathrev=201988
> This was billed as a temporary patch. It was also compatible with
> the then-current behavior of gawk. That temporary patch has lasted 16
> years now.
> 
> However, IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 changed the behaivor of ranges in regular
> expressions outside of the "C" and "POSIX" locales to be undefined.
> 
> Starting in 2011, gawk 4.0 stopped using the locale for the range
> regular expressions and used the traditional behavior only. The
> maintainer had grown weary of answering why '[A-Z]' would sometimes
> match lower-case expressions. The details about are explained here:
> https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Ranges-and-Locales.html
> 
> To restore compatibility with other implementaitons of awk, revert this
> patch. FreeBSD is the odd-system out. It also has the nice side effect
> of eliminating the last of our differences with upstream one-true-awk.
> 
> I'd like to commit the change at least to -current. Ideally, I'd like to MFC
> the change. I believe better compatibility with gawk and other awk
> implementations justifies this change in behavior because the current
> behavior is outside the mainstream enough to be considered a bug.
> 
> I'd like to solicit input before I do this, however.

My only concern on this is does anything in the ports system get
tickled by this change, I know its a pita, but maybe have an exp
run done?  I reviewed and accepted the differential, and by examination
I do not see how this could cause an issue now, so Meh give it a long
back in -current and things should be ok.

> Warner
-- 
Rod Grimes                                                 rgrimes@freebsd.org