Re: vi vs. nvi

[christos%zoulas.com@localhost (Christos Zoulas)]

On Aug 5,  1:11pm, tls%rek.tjls.com@localhost (Thor Lancelot Simon) wrote:
-- Subject: Re: vi vs. nvi

| On Tue, Aug 05, 2008 at 04:43:41PM +0200, Aymeric Vincent wrote:
| > 
| > Christos gave the reasons why nvi is bigger: the wchar_t-enabled regex
| > library and the compilation flags.
| 
| He did mention the compilation flags.  But that's going to be changed,
| right?
| 
| As to "the wchar_t-enabled regex library":  I object to paying once for
| the whole system (in libc) a lot less than once per executable.  In other
| words, "Christos gave the reasons why..." says precisely nothing about
| whether they are actually _sufficient_ reasons; it says only that they
| _are_ reasons.
| 
| I'm not against growing the system, if it provides adequate benefit.  I
| am still skeptical about whether there is adequate benefit for the
| considerable amount of growth in this case.

I think it adds 30K. The problem here is that there is no standard wregex
library. We can tweak nvi to pass UTF8 to the regular regex so save 30K,
but is it worth it? It will not work properly for non-ascii codepoints
anyway if we do this. When wregex is standard we can move it to libc and
call it a day. Even if we find a second user of wregex, we can move it to
libc. The choices are:
1. keep it as is
2. hack it to use regex with UTF8
3. move wregex to libc
4. compile without wide chars.

I say provide a makefile knob to compile without wide char support for
embedded systems.

christos