Re: Please consider replace src/dist/nvi with nvi2

[matthew sporleder <msporleder%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 7:28 AM, Zhihao Yuan <lichray%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> 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/


Very cool.  Were you aware of Itojun's previous work?

ftp://ftp.foretune.co.jp/pub/tools/nvi-m17n/
(from http://www.itojun.org/itojun.html)