PROJECTS

   1 Open jobs for finishing GNU libc:
   2 ---------------------------------
   3 Status: October 2004
   4
   5 If you have time and talent to take over any of the jobs below please
   6 contact <bug-glibc@gnu.org>.
   7
   8 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   9 \f
  10 [ 1] Port to new platforms or test current version on formerly supported
  11      platforms.
  12
  13 **** See http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/porting.html for more details.
  14
  15
  16 [ 2] Test compliance with standards.  If you have access to recent
  17      standards (IEEE, ISO, ANSI, X/Open, ...) and/or test suites you
  18      could do some checks as the goal is to be compliant with all
  19      standards if they do not contradict each other.
  20
  21
  22 [ 3] The IMHO opinion most important task is to write a more complete
  23      test suite.  We cannot get too many people working on this.  It is
  24      not difficult to write a test, find a definition of the function
  25      which I normally can provide, if necessary, and start writing tests
  26      to test for compliance.  Beside this, take a look at the sources
  27      and write tests which in total test as many paths of execution as
  28      possible.
  29
  30
  31 [ 4] Write translations for the GNU libc message for the so far
  32      unsupported languages.  GNU libc is fully internationalized and
  33      users can immediately benefit from this.
  34
  35      Take a look at the matrix in
  36         ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ABOUT-NLS
  37      for the current status (of course better use a mirror of ftp.gnu.org).
  38
  39
  40 [ 8] If you enjoy assembler programming (as I do --drepper :-) you might
  41      be interested in writing optimized versions for some functions.
  42      Especially the string handling functions can be optimized a lot.
  43
  44      Take a look at
  45
  46         Faster String Functions
  47         Henry Spencer, University of Toronto
  48         Usenix Winter '92, pp. 419--428
  49
  50      or just ask.  Currently mostly i?86 and Alpha optimized versions
  51      exist.  Please ask before working on this to avoid duplicate
  52      work.
  53
  54
  55 [11] Write access function for netmasks, bootparams, and automount
  56      databases for nss_files, nss_nis, and nss_nisplus modules.
  57      The functions should be embedded in the nss scheme.  This is not
  58      hard and not all services must be supported at once.
  59
  60
  61 [15] Cleaning up the header files.  Ideally, each header style should
  62      follow the "good examples".  Each variable and function should have
  63      a short description of the function and its parameters.  The prototypes
  64      should always contain variable names which can help to identify their
  65      meaning; better than
  66
  67                 int foo (int, int, int, int);
  68
  69      Blargh!
  70
  71 ***  The conformtest.pl tool helps cleaning the namespace.  As far as
  72      known the prototypes all contain parameter names.  But maybe some
  73      comments can be improved.
  74
  75
  76 [18] Based on the sprof program we need tools to analyze the output.  The
  77      result should be a link map which specifies in which order the .o
  78      files are placed in the shared object.  This should help to improve
  79      code locality and result in a smaller footprint (in code and data
  80      memory) since less pages are only used in small parts.
  81
  82
  83 [19] A user-level STREAMS implementation should be available if the
  84      kernel does not provide the support.
  85
  86 ***  This is a much lower priority job now that STREAMS are optional in
  87      XPG.
  88
  89
  90 [20] More conversion modules for iconv(3).  Existing modules should be
  91      extended to do things like transliteration if this is wanted.
  92      For often used conversion a direct conversion function should be
  93      available.
  94
  95
  96 [23] The `strptime' function needs to be completed.  This includes among
  97      other things that it must get teached about timezones.  The solution
  98      envisioned is to extract the timezones from the ADO timezone
  99      specifications.  Special care must be given names which are used
 100      multiple times.  Here the precedence should (probably) be according
 101      to the geograhical distance.  E.g., the timezone EST should be
 102      treated as the `Eastern Australia Time' instead of the US `Eastern
 103      Standard Time' if the current TZ variable is set to, say,
 104      Australia/Canberra or if the current locale is en_AU.
 105
 106
 107 [27] ...deleted...