Re: Documentation request: sed, grep and other regexs

[Zenaan Harkness]

> FWIW, many years ago I helped make a standalone regex distribution,
> including an extensive manual.  It was aimed at programmers more than
> users, but it could serve as a starting point.  (It is certainly very
> much out of date by now, so would need plenty of updating anyway.)
> ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/regex

Just build the doco for that package (seems ./configure actually made
the doco ??). That's an awesome starting point. It's not even that
small. I'm impressed. I'm going to run through it right now and get back
to you. This really ought to be made available. And right now I'm
inspired, so we'll see how things go. First step is reading the current
work.

If it were separated into its own manual, would you be happy with LGPL
license for it - I tend to think of regexes as relatively small,
self-contianed scripts, and LGPL (or even artistic) seems appropriate
for such code snippets. It always gets to me when a programming book
says the code is still copyright and unusable without permissions, etc,
etc. </rant>

> Another possible place for such a section would be the libc manual,
> although of course that is also aimed at programmers.
> 
> Perhaps a separate manual on user-level regular expressions is the way to go.

I think regex-users essentially become regex-programmers relatively
quickly. In my mind, one would ideally have all regex information
located in one place - a large manual with user-tutorial type chapters,
links to other doco chapter, reference chapters, etc, would be ideal I
think. This is Free Software, a user becomes a programmer becomes a
developer. And advanced users are just those who have learnt some
programming/ scripting anyway.

> Here's a web page that may be of interest (there's a summary of what
> supports what near the end):
> http://sitescooper.org/tao_regexps.html

Thanks. I'm sending an email off next to inquire about using it to add
to this new regex manual.

Finally, a regex-doc package is what I have in mind - so depending on
how I go, I'll be talking to you more about that - separating the doco.

cheers
zen

-- 
Mr Zenaan Harkness
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