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/
