Re: pcre in base system

On Thu, 2005-Feb-17 14:52:05 +0000, Sergey Lyubka wrote:
>Anyway, the last call is yours, guys committers.
>If you decide to do this pcre thing, I am willing to
>provide a patch for both sed and pcre.

In terms of effort, putting new software into the base system and
patching other utilities to use it should be fairly trivial.  The
major effort is maintaining it - validating and updating to new
releases.  Are you willing to provide ongoing maintenance for a
pcre import?

Based on the NetBSD thread, pcre also has an area where it is not
POSIX compliant (and does not plan to become POSIX compliant) and does
not provide BREs.  This may present a sticking point.

Overall, I'd prefer to see the base system become more minimal with
greater reliance on ports.  An interesting approach could be to
break out regex(3) from libc and allow base utilities to use shared
libraries from ports - this would allow someone to install the pcre
port and have the base sed(1) use it.

-- 
Peter Jeremy