Enter Libc
I spend last weeks on importing interesting parts of Apple’s libc to FreeBSD. I ended up with this patch: http://versus.ath.cx/patches/fbsd_7.0_collation.patch, which I than applied to the CURRENT libc, and commited as my p4 libc branch.
It wasn’t however without accident - I suffered two serious laptop breakages, ending with en essentially dead one. First the display broke down - stopped showing anything - I think it was the backlight. I was lucky - I had external monitor enabled and configured for Dual Head. When I connected it however, I started to get IDE timeout problems when booting FreeBSD. So my hard drive also died. I managed to boot off live-cd, and copy and my gsoc data, and that was it.
After installing everything on my new-bought laptop, I got to finishing my work on libc, and was able to get in into - I think - fully working state. There are still some little things I want to fix/enhance, but general functionality is there.
Now I’m focusing on writing regression tests, than will come manpages. At the end will be a call for testers.
August 5th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Would be very nice if you could provide a brief summary of what the patch adds saving us poor souls from browsing the entire patch
August 6th, 2008 at 8:10 am
And you want us to test this patch? It sounds evil. My laptop may blow up by just replying to this…
August 16th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
I’ll try to document it on my wiki better, when I fix some remaining issues.
Anyway, the patch adds support for Unicode Collation Algorithm to libc.
(http://wiki.freebsd.org/KonradJankowski/Collation)
Regarding testing, no, don’t test now.
First I have to make the regression tests pass.