heirloom utilities in pkgsrc

[Aleksey Cheusov <cheusov%tut.by@localhost>]

Greg proposed me to send announcement about heirloom packages I've just
imported to pkgsrc.

heirloom utilities are hosted here

   http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/tools.html
   http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/sh.html

Many of them were opensourced by Sun and Caldera about a decade ago.

Why I imported them: from time to time while testing my own shell and
awk scripts or debugging NetBSD/Linux utilities I'm wondering how they
work on systems other than NetBSD and Linux. heirloom helps me when I
have no acess to Solaris or whatever else.

0) UNIX utilities even buggy ones is a part of IT history

1) heirloom is portable to many OSes and can be run if you have no
   access to Solaris, HP-UX or SCO.

2) AFAIK heirloom-sh comes from pre-POSIX days and it is very close to
   /bin/sh from Solaris<=10. From POSIX point of view it is a big
   collection of bugs but we (pkgsrc) support Solaris.

3) heirloom-awk provides historical oawk, which is /usr/bin/awk
   on Solaris and some other OSes. It is... :-)

4) nawk is also provided by heirloom-nawk. Despite its name it is very
   different from NetBSD's awk. /usr/pkg/heirloom/bin/posix{,2001}/awk
   is claimed as POSIX compatible.

5) libuxre - regexp library aware of utf-8.
   heirloom-{grep,awk,sed,...} are linked against it.
   I know I'm in wrong mailing list but have a look at

    bin/38108 [non-critical/low]:
       single regexp implementation for NetBSD base system

   IMHO in a long term it makes sense to have only one regexp library in base.

6) heirloom-sort: unlike NetBSD sort and GNU sort works correctly with
   utf-8 (sort -f).

7) heirloom programs are small.

8) other utils may also be interesting and helpful

-- 
Best regards, Aleksey Cheusov.