[illumos-Developer] Establishing requirements and test cases for tail replacement

[Cedric Blancher]

On 6 September 2010 06:26,  <cjlove at san.rr.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> So I've been working on possible replacements for the closed bin 'tail' commands (/usr/bin/tail and /usr/xpg4/bin/tail) starting with the FreeBSD
> version.  Getting the FreeBSD version to build and run on Solaris was simple enough, but beyond that there's the issue of actual requirements and test cases.
>
> Comparing Solaris and FreeBSD tail there are different levels of standards compliance:  FreeBSD tail is said to be a superset of
> POSIX.2 (IEEE 1003.2-1992), while the legacy Solaris version cites IEEE 1003.1-2008.
>
> There are command-line usage differences which can be corrected in the FreeBSD code to match the legacy Solaris version.
>
> The Solaris tail(1) manpage specifies LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE as affecting its behavior.  I see no evidence that the FreeBSD code deals with this issue and I'm going to plead some level of ignorance here as a US developer who has never dealt with anything other than the default POSIX locale.
>
> From a test case standpoint I have derived some test cases from CoreUtils, validating them against the legacy Solaris tail to weed out
> GNU-specific features; this is by no means complete at this point.  POSIX compatibility test suites aside are there any (Solaris-specific) test suites available?

Have you read http://arc.opensolaris.org/caselog/PSARC/2009/249/ yet?
There is already a replacement in the tree which only has to be linked
to /usr/bin/tail and /usr/xpg4/bin/tail by a hardlink from
/usr/bin/alias. Test cases are
/usr/src/lib/libshell/common/tests/*tail*

Ced
-- 
Cedric Blancher <cedric.blancher at googlemail.com>
Institute Pasteur