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Edit File: PROJECTS

Open jobs for finishing GNU libc: --------------------------------- Status: October 2004 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). [ 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...