Re: Multibyte support for sort, uniq, join, tr, cut, paste, expand, unexpand, fmt, fold, and pr

[Assaf Gordon]

Hello,

Regarding the legalities:
On Sat, Mar 17, 2018 at 12:48 PM, Eric Fischer <address@hidden> wrote:
> I have been informed that the legal paperwork is all in place,

I can't seem to find records of that - can you provide the ticket
number (it will likely be
something like [gnu#12345678]) .

> I have been told that the legal paperwork in place only gives me a month to
> resolve whatever else needs to be done, so there is some urgency about this
> from my perspective.

Told by whom? that sounds like a somewhat strange limitation.
I humbly don't think that multibyte support for entire coreutils
programs will be concluded
in a month (given that it has taken many years so far to get any progress).

> [...] what I need to do to get my changes from
> accepted into the standard coreutils distribution.
[...]
> Are my changes to the tools other than tr acceptable to be merged? If not,
> will you tell me what else needs to be done (style? performance?
> portability? compatibility? documentation? tests?) to make them acceptable?

Two critical points were mentioned previously (items #2 and #3):
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2018-01/msg00035.html

As for style, please run "make syntax-check" and ensure no errors are reported.

For licensing: I assume all your contributions are GPLv3-or-later -
please ensure
there is a license notice in every file you add.

Documentation is also desirable, perhaps adding one section about
"multibyte support"
instead of mentioning something for every program?

Tests: running "make coverage" will help to detect new code that isn't
covered by existing tests -
it'll be useful to add tests to cover new cases.

Two things for later (not critical for now):
to make review easier, it's recommended to combine all commits that
relate to a single program
into one commit. This is called "squash" in git (see:
http://gitready.com/advanced/2009/02/10/squashing-commits-with-rebase.html
https://blog.carbonfive.com/2017/08/28/always-squash-and-rebase-your-git-commits/
).

A final patch should adhere to few more issues (e.g. proper subject
line, NEWS item,. etc.),
see here for details:
  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2018-01/msg00062.html

regards,
 - assaf