Changes/enhancements to non-kernel apps

[Matthew Dillon]

:Just curious as to what people think about changing/enhancing apps in
:(e.g.) /usr/bin that aren't critical to the kernel.
:
:In particular, I'm working on some enhancements to yacc to allow
:multiple copies of the same parser to coexist.  This is quite different
:from the usual hack of allowing different parsers to coexist (changing
:the yy- prefix to something else); basically, it entails wrapping the
:various globals holding parser state into a struct.
:
:I'm doing this in such a way that the modified yacc is backwards
:compatible -- i.e., you have to #define YYPARSERCLASS with the name
:of the struct in order to get the modified behavior.
:
:Is this stuff appropriate for Dragonfly, or should I try putting it
:elsewhere (FreeBSD, separate subfork, ...)?
 
    Hmm.  The issue with yacc is that you wouldn't really be able to 
    base any projects on the modified behavior and still have them be
    portable to other platforms.  It's such an old program, the behavior
    is pretty well set in stone from the point of view of 99.99% of the
    programmers who use it.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>