| Open jobs for finishing GNU libc: |
| --------------------------------- |
| Status: April 1997 |
| |
| If you have time and talent to take over any of the jobs below please |
| contact <bug-glibc@prep.ai.mit.edu> |
| |
| ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
| |
| [ 1] Port to new platforms or test current version on formerly supported |
| platforms. |
| |
| **** See http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/porting.html for more details. |
| |
| |
| [ 2] Test compliance with standards. If you have access to recent |
| standards (IEEE, ISO, ANSI, X/Open, ...) and/or test suites you |
| could do some checks as the goal is to be compliant with all |
| standards if they do not contradict each other. |
| |
| |
| [ 3] The IMHO opinion most important task is to write a more complete |
| test suite. We cannot get too many people working on this. It is |
| not difficult to write a test, find a definition of the function |
| which I normally can provide, if necessary, and start writing tests |
| to test for compliance. Beside this, take a look at the sources |
| and write tests which in total test as many paths of execution as |
| possible. |
| |
| |
| [ 4] Write translations for the GNU libc message for the so far |
| unsupported languages. GNU libc is fully internationalized and |
| users can immediately benefit from this. |
| |
| Take a look at the matrix in |
| ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/ABOUT-NLS |
| for the current status (of course better use a mirror of prep). |
| |
| |
| [ 5] Write wordexp() function; this is described in POSIX.2, the |
| header <wordexp.h> already exists. |
| |
| Implementation idea: use some functions from bash. |
| |
| **** Somebody is working on this. Help may or may not be appreciated. |
| |
| |
| [ 6] Write `long double' versions of the math functions. This should be |
| done in collaboration with the NetBSD and FreeBSD people. |
| |
| The libm is in fact fdlibm (not the same as in Linux libc). |
| |
| **** Partly done. But we need someone with numerical experiences for |
| the rest. |
| |
| |
| [ 7] Several math functions have to be written: |
| |
| - exp2 |
| |
| each with float, double, and long double arguments. |
| |
| Beside this most of the complex math functions which are new in |
| ISO C 9X should be improved. Writing some of them in assembler is |
| useful to exploit the parallelism which often is available. |
| |
| |
| [ 8] If you enjoy assembler programming (as I do --drepper :-) you might |
| be interested in writing optimized versions for some functions. |
| Especially the string handling functions can be optimized a lot. |
| |
| Take a look at |
| |
| Faster String Functions |
| Henry Spencer, University of Toronto |
| Usenix Winter '92, pp. 419--428 |
| |
| or just ask. Currently mostly i?86 and Alpha optimized versions |
| exist. Please ask before working on this to avoid duplicate |
| work. |
| |
| |
| [ 9] Write nftw() function. Perhaps it might be good to reimplement the |
| ftw() function as well to share most of the code. |
| |
| **** Almost done! |
| |
| |
| [10] Extend regex and/or rx to work with wide characters and complete |
| implementation of character class and collation class handling. |
| |
| It is planed to do a complete rewrite. |
| |
| |
| [11] Write access function for netmasks, bootparams, and automount |
| databases for nss_files and nss_db module. |
| The functions should be embedded in the nss scheme. This is not |
| hard and not all services must be supported at once. |
| |
| |
| [12] Rewrite utmp/wtmp functions to use database functions. This is much |
| better than the normal flat file format. |
| |
| **** There are plans for a new approach to this problem. Please contact |
| bug-glibc@prep.ai.mit.edu before starting to work.) |
| |
| |
| [13] Several more or less small functions have to be written: |
| |
| + tcgetid() and waitid() from XPG4.2 |
| + grantpt(), ptsname(), unlockpt() from XPG4.2 |
| + getdate() from XPG4.2 |
| *** Probably underway |
| + fmtmsg() from SVID |
| *** Probably underway |
| |
| More information are available on request. |
| |
| |
| [14] We need to write a library for on-the-fly transformation of streams |
| of text. In fact, this would be a recode-library (you know, GNU recode). |
| This is needed in several places in the GNU libc and I already have |
| rather concrete plans but so far no possibility to start this. |
| |
| |
| [15] Cleaning up the header files. Ideally, each header style should |
| follow the "good examples". Each variable and function should have |
| a short description of the function and its parameters. The prototypes |
| should always contain variable names which can help to identify their |
| meaning; better than |
| |
| int foo __P ((int, int, int, int)); |
| |
| Blargh! |