On Sun, Sep 12, 2004 at 12:48:54PM +0100, Qingning Huo wrote: > On close inspcetion of the source package, I found something > interesting. The upstream source code tarball actually contains a copy > of pcre (Perl-compatible regular expression library), but libpcre3 is > already in the deabin archive. On the other hand, the pcre code > contained in regexx is quite out of date, only version 3.4 (22-Aug-00), > while the source package of libpcre3 has version 4.5 (01-Dec-03). > > I think it would be better to use the libpcre3 library, make regexx > easier to maintain, and more up to date. Before I start working on it, > I would like know whether this is the best practice, and whether there > are any pitfalls. Making regexx use libpcre3 is an excellent idea if it's possible. However, there are a few things that might trip up your plans: 1) The copy of PCRE in the regexx source might be modified in some way. Ideally you'd want to get those changes incorporated into PCRE itself if possible, but that might not be possible because of licencing or an incompatible change. 2) Version 3.4 of PCRE is likely to be somewhat different to 4.5. You'll have to make very sure that regexx still works properly with the new version. A test suite would make that quite simple, but I don't know if you want to write a whole test suite from scratch for regexx so you can make the change. - Matt
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