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Open jobs for finishing GNU libc:
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Status: October 2004
If you have time and talent to take over any of the jobs below please
contact <bug-glibc@gnu.org>.
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[ 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://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ABOUT-NLS
for the current status (of course better use a mirror of ftp.gnu.org).
[ 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.
[11] Write access function for netmasks, bootparams, and automount
databases for nss_files, nss_nis, and nss_nisplus modules.
The functions should be embedded in the nss scheme. This is not
hard and not all services must be supported at once.
[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 (int, int, int, int);
Blargh!
*** The conformtest.pl tool helps cleaning the namespace. As far as
known the prototypes all contain parameter names. But maybe some
comments can be improved.
[18] Based on the sprof program we need tools to analyze the output. The
result should be a link map which specifies in which order the .o
files are placed in the shared object. This should help to improve
code locality and result in a smaller footprint (in code and data
memory) since less pages are only used in small parts.
[19] A user-level STREAMS implementation should be available if the
kernel does not provide the support.
*** This is a much lower priority job now that STREAMS are optional in
XPG.
[20] More conversion modules for iconv(3). Existing modules should be
extended to do things like transliteration if this is wanted.
For often used conversion a direct conversion function should be
available.
[23] The `strptime' function needs to be completed. This includes among
other things that it must get teached about timezones. The solution
envisioned is to extract the timezones from the ADO timezone
specifications. Special care must be given names which are used
multiple times. Here the precedence should (probably) be according
to the geograhical distance. E.g., the timezone EST should be
treated as the `Eastern Australia Time' instead of the US `Eastern
Standard Time' if the current TZ variable is set to, say,
Australia/Canberra or if the current locale is en_AU.
[27] ...deleted...
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