collation

Last time I said that it would be nice to use some Apple’s work in the area of collation. I exchanged a few emails with Jordan K. Hubbard and it seems we can user their code without problems - all interesting parts are still on the BSD licence. That’s because this is still our code, only extended by Apple. Even the copyrights weren’t changed a bit (so we don’t know who did the extending).

Anyway, as the code is fairly mature, I decided to use it. The libc part of the code is the one I am most interested in, but to see how it works, I first had to port the userland tool - Apple’s version of colldef. Doing this I extended it a little - to not choke on the expansions. As I don’t have the locale data that Apple is using, I made the tool work on my data - at the same time making it more posix compliant. There were many little issues while porting the code - and I wanted it to work perfectly before I submitted it - so it took me more than a week to complete the porting. I even made it compile with “-ansi -Wall -Wextra -pedantic”, thing I always do with my code.

Now, as the tool is completed and I did a final cleanup, I will test it on a bigger amount of data, and then proceed to port the libc part. I’m really excited to see how it works. When those two things are completed I will have to make a few more extensions to Apple’s code to make if fully compliant with UCA.