Re: Module request: wordexp

[Bruno Haible]

Daniel Macks wrote:
> Would be great to get wordexp into gnulib. OS X 10.4 finally has it,
> but it's incompletely implemented (the flags are ignored), so it's
> easy to *think* you're getting something ported when in fact it may
> not work correctly. OS X 10.5 claims to have the flags implemented,
> but there is an apparent bug (runtime crash due to a pointer not
> getting zeroed).

You are the first one to request wordexp() from gnulib. The demand is
probably so low because wordexp() is so tightly linked to the shell script
syntax that only shells can make use of it.

If you want to see wordexp() covered by gnulib, you probably need to
do something for it.

> I took a look at the whole glibc, but extracting just wordexp and
> disentangling all the other pieces or getting anywhere trying to
> configure the suite on a platform that it doesn't support ompiling the
> thing is beyond me as my first poking in the sources:(

But extracting from glibc and conditionalizing the loose ends is certainly
less work than writing an implementation and testsuite from scratch.

Even if you cannot do that work now, you can help by stating clearly which
flags of wordexp() leads to which bugs in which implementations. This would
fill a gap in gnulib's documentation [1]. Maybe you already have the testcase
for detecting the bug in MacOS X 10.4?

Bruno

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/wordexp.html