Open jobs for finishing GNU libc:
---------------------------------
-Status: November 1998
+Status: October 2004
If you have time and talent to take over any of the jobs below please
contact <bug-glibc@gnu.org>.
for the current status (of course better use a mirror of ftp.gnu.org).
-[ 6] Write `long double' versions of the math functions. This should be
- done in collaboration with the NetBSD and FreeBSD people.
-
- The libm is in fact fdlibm (not the same as in Linux libc).
-
-**** Partly done. But we need someone with numerical experiences for
- the rest.
-
-
-[ 7] Several math functions have to be written:
-
- - exp2
-
- with long double arguments.
-
- Beside this most of the complex math functions which are new in
- ISO C 9X should be improved. Writing some of them in assembler is
- useful to exploit the parallelism which often is available.
-
-
[ 8] If you enjoy assembler programming (as I do --drepper :-) you might
be interested in writing optimized versions for some functions.
Especially the string handling functions can be optimized a lot.
work.
-[10] Extend regex and/or rx to work with wide characters and complete
- implementation of character class and collation class handling.
-
- It is planned to do a complete rewrite.
-
-
[11] Write access function for netmasks, bootparams, and automount
- databases for nss_files and nss_db module.
+ databases for nss_files, nss_nis, and nss_nisplus modules.
The functions should be embedded in the nss scheme. This is not
hard and not all services must be supported at once.
-[14] We need to write a library for on-the-fly transformation of streams
- of text. In fact, this would be a recode-library (you know, GNU recode).
- This is needed in several places in the GNU libc and I already have
- rather concrete plans but so far no possibility to start this.
-
-*** The library is available, now it remains to be used in the streams.
-
-
[15] Cleaning up the header files. Ideally, each header style should
follow the "good examples". Each variable and function should have
a short description of the function and its parameters. The prototypes
should always contain variable names which can help to identify their
meaning; better than
- int foo __P ((int, int, int, int));
+ int foo (int, int, int, int);
Blargh!
-[16] The libio stream file functions should be extended in a way to use
- mmap to map the file and use it as the buffer to user sees. For
- read-only streams this should be rather easy and it avoids all read()
- calls.
+*** The conformtest.pl tool helps cleaning the namespace. As far as
+ known the prototypes all contain parameter names. But maybe some
+ comments can be improved.
- A more sophisticated solution would use mmap also for writing. The
- standards do not demand that the file on the disk is always in the
- correct form so it would be possible to enlarge it always according
- to the page size and install the correct length only for fclose() and
- fflush() calls.
[18] Based on the sprof program we need tools to analyze the output. The
result should be a link map which specifies in which order the .o
files are placed in the shared object. This should help to improve
- code locality and result in a smaller foorprint (in code and data
+ code locality and result in a smaller footprint (in code and data
memory) since less pages are only used in small parts.
+
[19] A user-level STREAMS implementation should be available if the
kernel does not provide the support.
+*** This is a much lower priority job now that STREAMS are optional in
+ XPG.
+
+
[20] More conversion modules for iconv(3). Existing modules should be
extended to do things like transliteration if this is wanted.
For often used conversion a direct conversion function should be
available.
-[21] The nscd program and the stubs in the libc should be changed so
- that each program uses only one socket connect. Take a look at
- http://www.cygnus.com/~drepper/nscd.html
-
-[22] It should be possible to have the information gconv-modules in
- a simple database which is faster to access. Using libdb is probably
- overkill and loading it would probably be slower than reading the
- plain text file. But a file format with a simple hash table and
- some data it points to should be fine. Probably it should be
- two tables, one for the aliases, one for the mappings. The code
- should start similar to this:
-
- if (stat ("gconv-modules", &stp) == 0
- && stat ("gconv-modules.db", %std) == 0
- && stp.st_mtime < std.st_mtime)
- {
- ... use the database ...
- {
- else
- {
- ... use the plain file if it exists, otherwise the db ...
- }
[23] The `strptime' function needs to be completed. This includes among
other things that it must get teached about timezones. The solution
Standard Time' if the current TZ variable is set to, say,
Australia/Canberra or if the current locale is en_AU.
-[24] Allow add-ons to specify dependencies and generate the content of
- `all-subdirs' in Makeconfig dynamically.
+
+[27] ...deleted...