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Hi, |
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|
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recently I stumbled across a problem with mawk, which is apprearly |
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Ubuntu's default awk interpreter. |
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This brought the idea to my mind of adding a virtual for awk. Beside |
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the fact that we already have 3 awk interpreters in gx86 (gawk, mawk |
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and busybox awk), there are other ones like nawk and awka. |
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|
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I had some discussions with spanKY on that topic in bug #415689, which |
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summarizes in the following: |
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|
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Advantages: |
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- mawk is faster - useful for scientific purposes |
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- busybox awk could replace gawk on minimal systems |
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- more POSIX conform systems |
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|
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Disadvantages: |
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- some awk code in the tree and portage is probably using GNU |
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extensions without executing gawk explicitly |
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- gray zone of Posix 1003.2 (e.g. substr() function and an index of 0) |
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|
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What we would need: |
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- virtual/awk |
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- app-admin/eselect-awk (version available in cj-overlay) |
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and |
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- testing and migration of existing packages using gawk |
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<http://qa-reports.gentoo.org/output/genrdeps/rindex/sys-apps/gawk> |
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and |
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<http://qa-reports.gentoo.org/output/genrdeps/dindex/sys-apps/gawk> |
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to name a few. |
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|
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I have tested mawk as default interpreter for a while on my x86 boxes |
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and didn't observed any problems so far. |
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|
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Cheers, |
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|
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Christoph |
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|
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-- |
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Christoph Junghans |
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http://dev.gentoo.org/~ottxor/ |
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