Gábor’s Blog

I haven’t made too much noise in these days because I’m quite busy but this doesn’t mean that I’ve completely abandoned FreeBSD. A summary of my recent progress:

• BSD grep: Finally, it seems working and compatible with GNU grep. A portbuild test is necessary to make sure nothing breaks with this and if the test performs well, we don’t have any barriers to have an own grep implementation, which is independent from GNU, smaller and cleaner.
• NLS in libc: NLS support was disabled in libc a long time ago due to some issues with the catalog handling code. Now they are resolved but NLS was kept off. I’ve collected some catalogs, made a patch to turn it on and made some tests. It seems that I can commit this stuff soon.
• BSD sort: I’ve started a sort implementation from scratch. It performs well and there are few missing features so I expect this to be ready soon. Not so soon as the former two items, but quite soon. Stay tuned!

I’ve fixed the known issues with BSD grep and rewritten some parts as my mentors suggested. Now I’m waiting for his answer about the current code and if he thinks it’s ok, I’ll submit it to portmgr@ for a thorough test. The last time grep failed on pointyhat due to a bug in -v.

As for BSD diff, I have completed some features, but still there are various to implement. The current status can be seen here.

There were some discussions on hackers@ and current@ about BSD grep, but I haven’t yet written anything about it here, so it’s high time to do so. First, you can see here what I have done. As you see, the list of functions is complete. There is -P (–perl-regexp), which never worked on FreeBSD, but I will try to add this as an optional feature to have a nice and complete grep implementation.

There are some problems, though. GNU accepts non-standard regexes, for example (a|), which has an empty subexpression, while our regex library doesn’t. First, I tried to  workaround these in the code, but as I was pointed out later it broke other cases, thus I had to realize that it was not so easy to fix and I needed to remove those workarounds, thus the problem still persists. I’ve looked at our regex library a bit. It was written by Henry Spencer. He has a new version of his library but that version still has the same behaviour. I’ve been told about the PCRE library, which has a POSIX-compatible interface. I realized that in fact it’s just the interface, the interpretation of the expressions in still Perl-like. Solutions are still needed…

Finally, it’s ready! It was committed to CVS by pgj@. You can read it here.

This year, I’m working on porting grep, sort and diff from OpenBSD. You can read more about my project in the original proposal. If you wanto to see the progress, you can look at my wiki page, although I’m going to post the most important milestones here.

Hooray! Gábor Páli is now a translator doc committer. He has translated the whole FreeBSD Handbook to Hungarian. The review of the document is pending at the moment.

Our new translator, Gábor Páli has been doing very well, he submitted 4 new translations, which I committed today, thus we have now a webpage and 6 articles. We are considering starting the translation of handbook, too. I’m glad that made such a good progress in this project and I hope other volunteers will join when they see our results and realize that this is a serious project.

Ok, it’s been a while that I’ve written here, thus I’m dropping some lines about SoC. You can check the actual progress on my wiki page, but I want to write about two parts, which I considered the most important. One of those is the DESTDIR functionality for ports. I also invested a lot of time and effort into this during SoC 2006, but that time I went into a wrong direction. Sometimes it is hard to implement a new functionality later, which was not planned originally, it seems it happened in that case. The good idea came too late and I could not accomplish that in 2006, but as I could participate again, I successfully reworked it and we have now a simple, but working version in CVS. This implementation uses chroot(1) and it made the structure of the ports/Mk code a bit simpler as we have it as a real module, called bsd.destdir.mk.

The another important project was to extract the Perl code from bsd.port.mk into bsd.perl.mk to make it more flexible and better modularized. Each major functionality has a module in ports/Mk, but it hasn’t been the case with Perl thus far. Besides, there hasn’t been implemented a convenient way of version checking. As usual we wanted something like:
USE_PERL5= 5.8.0+
I implemented this syntax for the following knobs: USE_PERL5, USE_PERL5_RUN, USE_PERL5_BUILD, PERL_CONFIGURE and PERL_MODBUILD. With this change each Makefile looks simpler and they provide a consistent IGNORE message if no appropriate Perl version is available. While here, I sweeped the ports and removed the support for old Perl versions to make things even clearer. The big patch hasn’t been committed yet, portmgr@ is running some tests on the package building cluster, as this is a really heavy change and we should pay much attention when handling this case.

Summaryzing this summer, I have to admit that I could not work as intensively as I presaw, because I had private life issues at the beginning of the program. Despite, I think it was cool enough, and of course, I’m going to continue the work on the Ports infrastructure.

Again, the fun has begun. We have a lot of interesting projects. Mine is accepted again. Here’s what I’m going to work on with the mentorship of Andrew Pantyukhin(sat@):

http://www.kovesdan.org/soc/article.html