[Raion]

So while everything is going on with Nekoware II, I'm beginning to draft the first patchsets for IRIXCE, and am starting an RFC so we can discuss further on how the RFC affects you, and what will be changed, as well as options and changes that will help a user running IRIX. 

Here's the current patchset information for IRIXCE (Keep in mind, these upgrades are optional, will work with Nekoware and other projects, and while care will be taken to prevent issues with historical programs, there is no guarantee) as I've drafted it:

Shells
TCSH > Can be directly upgraded to latest tcsh with no issues, and no additional dependencies
KSH88 > Was originally considering mksh, but there's a few issues: Framemaker can break, some scripts do not have compatible syntax and would need to be patched; ksh93 is a possible option. 

Lang
Perl > Upgrade to latest Perl without issues
TCL > Upgrade to latest without issues
Python? (Should we consider including python 2.7?)

Libraries
zlib > 2002 version can be upgraded to latest without issues
openssl > Latest can be installed, but it breaks sgi_apache/webforce (I don't think that anyone uses those anyways?)
X extensions? (Should we compile and add X extensions)

Archiving
tar > Add jpstewart's script/C lang to autoexec various utils
gzip > Can be replaced with pigz easily and symlinked. Same flags, and has parallel capabilities
xz? Both regular xz and pixz (parallel xz) can be installed easily
bzip2? pbzip2 can be installed

Headers
asprintf/vasprintf? (There exists solaris headers that work on IRIX to add these) 
mmap MAP_ANON definition? (Should we add this to ease porting?)
setenv, unsetenv? (BSD-licensed versions I've found should work) 

Desktop Apps
Nedit > Can be upgraded to latest

Some other stuff to note:

I am opposed, in base, to including GPLv2/v3 code if we don't need it. That's why pigz, which has better performance on multi-threaded CPUs like IRIX runs on anyways, was selected. It uses the zlib license. 

Everything else is not bound under that, Nedit is GPLv1.

Purpose: Patch security holes in IRIX, and make it easier to ship some upgraded stuff that keeps close compatibility with the base. 

Thoughts? Comments?