Report #9: Unicode support

[Dmitry Selyutin]

Hello everyone!

Here are the last news about the Unicode support project[0].
You can always check my repository[1].

During these days I had hardware problems (my HDD peacefully died), so
development didn't progress so much as before. However, I've
eliminated these problems, so I tried to fix bugs and reorganize the
code as much as possible. Now everything shall compile.

I decided to use __attribute__((constructor)) and
__attribute__((destructor)), since I don't know if there exist a
better way to open a file once in the startup and closing it when all
routines close. I've found one or two occurrences of this construction
in FreeBSD code; AFAICT it is rather common in clang and gcc, so I
decided to use it. Hopefully it will also allow us to use root
collation database in the embedded systems (if any such system really
needs collation algorithm).

As you may know we need a tool that can convert collation text files
obtained from unicode.org to new collation database (colldb) format.
There is a version of this tool written in Python
(share/examples/colldb/colldb.py). IIRC we can't use Python when we
have a base system though, so it seems that we need to written such
tool using C language. I was thinking of lex/yacc combo; I've never
tried it, but I think it shouldn't be too hard to write a tool using
it. I'd like to know your opinions about this task.
I've already written a man page (bin/colldb/colldb.1). The only thing
which seems dubious is that I decided to use the same name as for the
library itself (well, it seems I have a lack of imagination). So we
have both colldb.1 and colldb.3 man pages.

The other thing I'd really like to do is to really force network byte
order in collation database format (I'm sure I've seen a way to do it
in Berkley databases). It's a pity that I have no platform with
big-endian (or even PDP!) byte order. Any help here is highly
appreciated (as well as your thoughts about lex/yacc, i.e. thoughts
whether it fits well to my task).

Since Google Summer of Code period has passed, I'd like to thank both
my mentors, Pedro and David, who gave me a helping hand during this
project, and especially Konrad Jankowski, who found time to answer my
questions and help me too. Though GSoC is closed, I'd like to stay
with FreeBSD project. First of all, I want to finish and bring to mind
this project: I don't think it's really finished, especially its
testing part, though it seems that new collation algorithm can already
be used. Then I'd like to work in other parts of my project,
especially in internationalization parts. I'd also like to improve my
own library, qc, to provide a rich API for *BSD and POSIX systems,
since I acutely feel the lack of such API. If it is possible to stay
with project, I'd be very happy to do it. :-)

P.S. Does anyone knows how to get diff between only for my branch
(i.e. for my part of repository)? svn diff -r $FIRST:$LAST seems to
give everything what all FreeBSD's GSoC have done, so I need some
other command. Thanks for your help!

[0] https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2014/Unicode
[1] https://socsvn.freebsd.org/socsvn/soc2014/ghostmansd

-- 
With best regards,
Dmitry Selyutin