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Open jobs for finishing GNU libc:
---------------------------------
Status: April 1998
If you have time and talent to take over any of the jobs below please
contact <bug-glibc@gnu.org>.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[ 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).
[ 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
with 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.
[10] Extend regex and/or rx to work with wide characters and complete
implementation of character class and collation class handling.
It is planned 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.
[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.
*** The library is available, now it remains to be used in the streams.
[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!
[16] The libio stream file functions should be extended in a way to use
mmap to map the file and use it as the buffer to user sees. For
read-only streams this should be rather easy and it avoids all read()
calls.
A more sophisticated solution would use mmap also for writing. The
standards do not demand that the file on the disk is always in the
correct form so it would be possible to enlarge it always according
to the page size and install the correct length only for fclose() and
fflush() calls.
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