From 02d288d89683e99fd18fe9f54d4e731a6c474a4f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Rich Felker Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2012 01:38:35 -0400 Subject: initial check-in --- README | 38 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 38 insertions(+) create mode 100644 README (limited to 'README') diff --git a/README b/README new file mode 100644 index 0000000..99298cd --- /dev/null +++ b/README @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +noXCUse: New Open XCU Simple Edition + or, No Excuse for bloat and brokenness + +This package is a collection of implementation of some (but by no +means all) of the utilities specified in the SUS/POSIX "XCU" (Shell & +Utilities) volume. They are designed to be as simple as possible while +meeting the requirements of the standard and general usability +considerations (like not being horrendously slow or imposing excessive +limitations). Unlike other size-oriented implementations such as +Busybox and Toybox, noXCUse does not use a unified binary or +significant amounts of shared-across-tools library code, making it +easy to cherry-pick the set of tools you need for a particular system. + +Development priority has been given to the tools whose implementations +in Busybox are inadequate; in most cases, it's a matter of Busybox +failing to support multibyte characters (UTF-8) in utilities whose +primary function is character processing (such as fold and wc). + +In addition to the "priority" utilities, some low-hanging fruit (that +is, utterly trivial utilities) has been included simply "because it's +easy". + +These utilities were developed and tested using musl as the C library, +and while they aim to be conforming programs with respect to SUS, they +make some assumptions: for example that multibyte character encoding +is stateless and that resynchronization is possible. The iconv utility +also has a hard-coded list of (as subset of) the charsets supported by +musl, since there is no portable way to query the C iconv interface +for this information. + +Finally, note that aside from the iconv utility, no development has +been done on these utilities since 2007 (pre-SUSv4/POSIX-2008). I may +gradually add more utilities to the collection, but this is completely +a side project. + +Cheers, + +Rich Felker / dalias -- cgit v1.2.1