Please consider replace src/dist/nvi with nvi2

[Zhihao Yuan <lichray%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hi, hackers:

I'm maintaining another multibyte nvi fork, nvi2 https://github.com/lichray/nvi2

The project was written for FreeBSD GSoC 2011[1]. However, FreeBSD
requires code review before accepting the code, and I found no people
to help me yet. But NetBSD already accept nvi-1.81 in the base system,
so I come to here first to advise you to accept my version since it's
*much* *more* robust and trustful.

Sven's nvi-1.8x has ton of bug and problems. Let me try to catalog some of them:

1. It does not work. Under a zh_CN.GB* locale, :se fe=utf-8, and input
Chinese, crashes. After I fixed the problem, try to pasting long text,
text longer than 256 becomes ^@ (NUL char in vi).
2. Memory leaking. iconv_t are never free'd. Since int2char and
char2int share the same buffer, sometimes strdup is required, and
those are seldom free'd.
3. Bugs caused by buffer sharing, like this
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=664579 . I searches
the whole Internet for any nvi-1.8x bugs and fix them.
4. Broken behaviors, incompatible with nvi-1.79/historical vi. The ^X
bug, #+/- bug, c$ on wide strings, isblank(3) (the upstream even uses
iswblank(3)... joking?), etc.
5. Other logic glitches caused by the new screen layout.

Since nvi2 is forked from nvi-1.79 and merged only nvi-1.8x's
iconv-related code, my version is free of problem 5 and the license
problem with DB3/4. And since I implemented the Unicode escape
sequence representation for non-print wide-chars, I fixed all of the
known bugs of type 1,3,4. All known memory leaking (except 2; I can
explain if you want a technical discuss) are also fixed with the help
of valgrind.

I even fixed some broken stuff in nvi-1.79, like the cscope support.
It's marked as an feature of nvi but it never worked actually...

If nvi2 is just a collection of patches, I'm not going to say
"replace". I also developed something new, something useful:

1. UTF-16 editing support.
2. File encoding detection. Detects for UTF-16 (w BOM) and UTF-8, and
fallbacks to locale.
3. Multibyte message. No more \x?? with printable wide strings in messages.
4. Enhanced usability on BSDs. openpty(3), flock(2)-only locking, etc.
5. Internal sendmail function. Nvi sends recovery notifications when
system start up, but /usr/sbin/sendmail is too slow.
6. Recover files with arbitrary file name -- my version base64 them in
the recovery files.
7. Full-featured file name completion. The completion accepts/yields
escaped path, like your bash/tcsh.

So, in a word, if you are interesting in replacing your src/dist/nvi
with nvi2, please check here[2] first and I'm open to any questions.
Thanks.

..[1] Multibyte Encoding Support in Nvi
https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/zy/1
..[2] Porting Instructions https://github.com/lichray/nvi2/wiki/Porting

-- 
Zhihao Yuan, nickname lichray
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
___________________________________________________
4BSD -- http://4bsd.biz/