FreeTDS Development Group

[jklowden AT schemamania.org]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 09:49:30AM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 10:04:48PM -0400, James K. Lowden wrote:
> > Thanks Steve!  Am I missing something, or is that totally broken?  
...
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap09.html#tag_09_01
> 
> > which clearly defines [:space:] as a basic RE character class expression. 
> 
> Yes, you're correct.  This appears to be
> <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=314323>.
> 
> Since mawk hasn't had an upstream since 1997, I don't know what the
> prognosis is for getting this fixed, really; though <cough> since I'm the
> package maintainer, I suppose I could have a look.

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/awkbook/index.html
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/bwk/awk.tar.gz

I'm sure there was once a reason for mawk or even GNU awk.  Nowadays the One 
True Awk from none other than Bell Labs is BSD-licensed.  The README says:

        This is the version of awk described in 
        "The AWK Programming Language", by Al Aho, 
        Brian Kernighan, and Peter Weinberger
        (Addison-Wesley, 1988, ISBN 0-201-07981-X)."
        
If that's not enough, I downloaded and built it by just typing "make".  It 
recognizes [[:space:]] as part of a field separator.  (The file b.c seems to 
have the regex implementation.)  

If I were to ask you to do anything, it wouldn't be to start fixing an 
obsolete program that hasn't been updated in 12 years.  It would be to 
petition the Forces of Good within Debian Intergalactic Headquarters to punt 
mawk in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri and use the real thing instead.  

Or, as package maintainer, you could update the mawk source code using rm(1) 
and ftp(1).  

But I'm not asking.  I'm just saying....  ;-)

--jkl