glibc/PROJECTS

Open jobs for finishing GNU libc:
---------------------------------
Status: October 2004

If you have time and talent to take over any of the jobs below please
contact <bug-glibc@gnu.org>.

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[ 1] Port to new platforms or test current version on formerly supported
     platforms.

**** See http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/porting.html for more details.


[ 2] Test compliance with standards.  If you have access to recent
     standards (IEEE, ISO, ANSI, X/Open, ...) and/or test suites you
     could do some checks as the goal is to be compliant with all
     standards if they do not contradict each other.


[ 3] The IMHO opinion most important task is to write a more complete
     test suite.  We cannot get too many people working on this.  It is
     not difficult to write a test, find a definition of the function
     which I normally can provide, if necessary, and start writing tests
     to test for compliance.  Beside this, take a look at the sources
     and write tests which in total test as many paths of execution as
     possible.


[ 4] Write translations for the GNU libc message for the so far
     unsupported languages.  GNU libc is fully internationalized and
     users can immediately benefit from this.

     Take a look at the matrix in
	ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ABOUT-NLS
     for the current status (of course better use a mirror of ftp.gnu.org).


[ 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.

     Take a look at

	Faster String Functions
	Henry Spencer, University of Toronto
	Usenix Winter '92, pp. 419--428

     or just ask.  Currently mostly i?86 and Alpha optimized versions
     exist.  Please ask before working on this to avoid duplicate
     work.


[11] Write access function for netmasks, bootparams, and automount
     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.


[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 (int, int, int, int);

     Blargh!

***  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.


[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 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.


[23] The `strptime' function needs to be completed.  This includes among
     other things that it must get teached about timezones.  The solution
     envisioned is to extract the timezones from the ADO timezone
     specifications.  Special care must be given names which are used
     multiple times.  Here the precedence should (probably) be according
     to the geograhical distance.  E.g., the timezone EST should be
     treated as the `Eastern Australia Time' instead of the US `Eastern
     Standard Time' if the current TZ variable is set to, say,
     Australia/Canberra or if the current locale is en_AU.


[27] ...deleted...