[gentoo-dev] Re: RFC: Virtual for awk implementation

[Christoph Junghans]

No objections and 2x +1, so I will commit  virtual/awk to ~arch and
app-admin/eselect-awk to ~arch & masked for testing.

Please port packages to virtual/awk (if possible) and make bug reports
block on the awk porting tracker (bug #418473).

2012/5/29 Christoph Junghans <ottxor@g.o>:
> 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
> <http://qa-reports.gentoo.org/output/genrdeps/rindex/sys-apps/gawk>
> and
> <http://qa-reports.gentoo.org/output/genrdeps/dindex/sys-apps/gawk>
> 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/



-- 
Christoph Junghans
http://dev.gentoo.org/~ottxor/