[bug-grep] Plan for grep

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,

On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 02:09:54AM -0500, Charles Levert wrote:
> Stepan:  It would be nice to devise a summary roadmap
> including an identification of things that should go in a
> 2.5.2 milestone release and of other things that should go
> in a 2.6.0 milestone release (or any in between).
> Maybe bug fixes vs. new functionality, enhanced performance,
> or heavy refactoring.

yes, I should outline that.

I did one mistake: I wanted to react promptly to newcomers, like
you and Claudio, in order to give a sense that the grep community
is alive.  In fact, I should rather spend my time doing things which
I promised long ago.

I'm afraid that most of the patches currently on savannah will have
to wait some time.  I apologize to you, who invested your effort to
develop them.  Details below.

2.5.2
=====
Our main goal for grep 2.5.2 is to get sane performance with utf-8.
That can be achieved by the patches written by Tim Waugh for Red Hat.

Besides that, I can do some changes in the infrastructure, so that
I can "breathe":

1) rewrite the configure.in script, perhaps also Makefile.am
2) set up for gnulib-tool --import
3) improve the test ifrastructure

I'm afraid I have to do 1) myself, and it is closely tied with 2),
so they probably have to be done together.

If someone likes awk and wanted to help with 3), it could help.
In short, there should be only one awk script for .test-->.script
rule.  The header of each .test file should state some details,
like which command to run, eg. "grep -E".  We also heve to invent
a way to collect the test cases for non-C locales; either by
running the whole set twice, or by creating a separate .test files.
The "make check" goal should run this, if the computer has a locale
like en_US.utf8 installed.

After completing these, we can:
4) check in the patches for the sync of dfa.c with GNU awk
5) other small patches which wait for a test case
6) process the RedHat patches

After 6), I should repeat Tim's measurments and see whether the utf8
performance improved.

Independently, I'd like to see
7) some _minimal_ cleanup of the grep(), grepdir(), recursion
   (the "main loop") and fix --directories=read
8) mark the -P option clearly as "experimental";

Well, that'll be perhaps enough for a release.

2.5.3
=====
Fix the combinations:
 * -i -o
 * --colour -i
 * -o -b
 * -o and zero-width matches
Go through the bug list im my mailbox and fix fixable.
Fix bugs reported with 2.5.2.

2.6.x
=====
The following should go here:
 - upgrade to current regex.c from glibc,
 - new functionality,
 - fixes for -P,
 - heavy refactoring.

OK, we have plan.  I'm afraid I should invest my time to these points
rather then to trying to be a good netizen and answer mails.

Have a nice day,
        Stepan