From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org ([208.92.234.80] helo=lists.gentoo.org) by finch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1SZWWc-0001IM-R1 for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Wed, 30 May 2012 00:12:31 +0000 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 81C8AE06F7; Wed, 30 May 2012 00:12:16 +0000 (UTC) Received: from smtp.gentoo.org (smtp.gentoo.org [140.211.166.183]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C1779E067D for ; Wed, 30 May 2012 00:11:39 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail-ob0-f181.google.com (mail-ob0-f181.google.com [209.85.214.181]) (using TLSv1 with cipher RC4-MD5 (128/128 bits)) (No client certificate requested) (Authenticated sender: ottxor) by smtp.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 3D05B1B401E for ; Wed, 30 May 2012 00:11:39 +0000 (UTC) Received: by obbuo19 with SMTP id uo19so9043708obb.40 for ; Tue, 29 May 2012 17:11:37 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.182.5.164 with SMTP id t4mr13601564obt.1.1338336697530; Tue, 29 May 2012 17:11:37 -0700 (PDT) Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.76.77.8 with HTTP; Tue, 29 May 2012 17:11:17 -0700 (PDT) From: Christoph Junghans Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 17:11:17 -0700 Message-ID: Subject: [gentoo-dev] RFC: Virtual for awk implementation To: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-Archives-Salt: b681421e-0ca5-436f-b51c-046eb100c741 X-Archives-Hash: 40f73850f12ff19fd834d48032586f15 Hi, recently I stumbled across a problem with mawk, which is apprearly Ubuntu's default awk interpreter. This brought the idea to my mind of adding a virtual for awk. Beside the fact that we already have 3 awk interpreters in gx86 (gawk, mawk and busybox awk), there are other ones like nawk and awka. I had some discussions with spanKY on that topic in bug #415689, which summarizes in the following: Advantages: - mawk is faster - useful for scientific purposes - busybox awk could replace gawk on minimal systems - more POSIX conform systems Disadvantages: - some awk code in the tree and portage is probably using GNU extensions without executing gawk explicitly - gray zone of Posix 1003.2 (e.g. substr() function and an index of 0) What we would need: - virtual/awk - app-admin/eselect-awk (version available in cj-overlay) and - testing and migration of existing packages using gawk and to name a few. I have tested mawk as default interpreter for a while on my x86 boxes and didn't observed any problems so far. Cheers, Christoph -- Christoph Junghans http://dev.gentoo.org/~ottxor/