[illumos-Developer] tr webrev

[I. Szczesniak]

On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 2:06 AM, Garrett D'Amore <garrett at damore.org> wrote:
> So, we're faced with a choice.
>
> The NetBSD tr sounds like it works correctly in some cases that our
> current FreeBSD does not.
>
> But from reading the review, NetBSD tr lacks support for some things
> that FreeBSD supposedly has.  Chiefly support for internationalization
> (which is important when dealing with multibyte locales or character
> sets that have different interpretations for character classes), and
> support for -C.
>
> Here are the options I see:
>
> a) fix the existing FreeBSD implementation.  Its hard to see if this is
> more or less work.
>
> b) use the NetBSD implementation, and accept the limitations, and
> possibly work on fixing them later.
>
> c) look at Olga's work on this -- I know that she had a ksh93/ast
> derived version of tr, but I seem to recall that there were some
> problems with it.

Those problems were fixed the day after they were reported.  I have to
check whether Glenn has already merged them into the latest beta.
The only missing feature for full SUSv4 support in AST tr would be
option -C. This however is not trivial and the GNU coreutils team has
claimed that Apple has a patent for the "only viable algorithm to do
it without precalculated collation data".

Irek