Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2012 11:55:13 +0100 From: Gabor Kovesdan <gabor@kovesdan.org> To: hiren panchasara <hiren.panchasara@gmail.com> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, Pedro Giffuni <pfg@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Porting patch(1) from NetBSD to FreeBSD (was Re: FreeBSD in Google Code-In 2012? You can help too!) Message-ID: <508D0F11.1060203@kovesdan.org> In-Reply-To: <CALCpEUHXkyPgqaypkiatx978jjMbiYtvMZC3nNHNpnRSdLf=PA@mail.gmail.com> References: <CALCpEUHXkyPgqaypkiatx978jjMbiYtvMZC3nNHNpnRSdLf=PA@mail.gmail.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Em 27-10-2012 23:17, hiren panchasara escreveu: > Hi Pedro / List, > > I am not part of google summer of code but I've tried to port patch(1) from > NetBSD into FreeBSD head. I hope that is okay. > > Patching was trivial and It _seems_ to be working fine. > > I would appreciate any ideas around how to test the changes and how to > proceed further. Hi Hiren, good to hear that someone is working on this! However, porting these utilies is much tougher than it apparently seems. There are much more criteria than just it compiles and works. More specifically, you should make sure that: - It is feature-complete and has at least the features that are present in the current patch. - Features are actually compatible and do the same. The same set of command-line options have to produce identical output. - Performance is not behind the current implementation. - It works fine with multi-byte locales. - As mentioned by someone else, it should be available as a port for testers. And once the above points seem to be ok, you should ask the portmgr team to do a package build with it. It may reveal some problems that you couldn't produce earlier. - And as seen in BSD grep, all of this above may not be enough, there may still be some undiscovered bugs. :) So it should co-exist with the current patch for some time, first as a secondary one and then as the default and only then should the current patch be removed. BSD sort has gone through all of this but BSD grep is still not completed. These utilities are apparently simple but because of their importance, they need to be near to flawless so this makes it a good challenge. I hope you will enjoy hacking and hope you can make some progress in this! Gabor
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?508D0F11.1060203>