Re: CFT: BSD-licensed grep [Fwd: cvs commit: ports/textproc/bsdgrep Makefile distinfo]

From: Kris Kennaway <kris_at_FreeBSD.org>
Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:57:17 +0200
Gábor Kövesdán wrote:
> 
>>> Well, it seems you have missed the first nits of the discussion. GNU 
>>> grep has some regression test, which doesn't pass completely itself 
>>> either. :) I've mentioned here that I used those tests to find out 
>>> what incompatible options are there. Unfortunately, I have to say 
>>> that BSD grep won't pass all of those, because GNU allows some 
>>> non-standard regexes, which are rejected by our libc-regex library, 
>>> like for example (a|) is not standard because it has an empty 
>>> subexpression. First, I tried to pre-edit such expression in the 
>>> code. It was ugly enough but I thought: "Ok, this code is pretty 
>>> ugly, but compatibility is important, maybe we can later revise 
>>> and/or change our regexp library and get rid of these snippets." 
>>> Later, when Andrey pointed it out, I realized that my workarounds 
>>> adressed those incompatibilities but didn't work completely, they 
>>> broke compatibility at other places, thus I just removed them, 
>>> because it was not that easy to fix. The version that I sent you for 
>>> the portbuild test, doesn't have those workarounds. The regression 
>>> test helped though to fix other compatibility issues, like return 
>>> values. All of these trivial things are supposed to be compatible 
>>> now, the only exceptions are the non-standard regexes. That's why I'm 
>>> so curious about the results. If they are inacceptable, we can try to 
>>> build BSD grep with the GNU regexp lib (it's in the tree, as Pedro F. 
>>> Giffuni pointed it out). It doesn't work by just linking with that 
>>> library, so it will need more work and investigation then, not 
>>> speaking about that GNU regex should go one day...
>>
>> OK, yes I did miss the start of the thread, but I was trying to 
>> suggest that grep doesn't seem to be functional enough yet and this is 
>> a way to work on identifying what needs to be fixed.
> Could you please send me some logs of ports which build with GNU grep 
> but not with BSD grep? That would help me to identify the problems and 
> find out if those problems come from non-standard regexes or what's 
> happening here?

No, because every port build fails because egrep -v is failing to work 
properly in the management scripts :)  I sent you mail about this already.

Kris
Received on Tue Jul 08 2008 - 11:57:15 UTC

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