Release what we've got?

[Julian Foad]

I think it's time to lower our sights a bit and release Grep 2.5.2 with the 
fixes that are in CVS at the moment.  I feel that this would help a few users 
in a small way, but more importantly would focus more people's attention on the 
work and encourage developers by demonstrating that it is possible to get the 
bugs fixed and released.  People would look at the new version, be glad that a 
few bugs are fixed, see that one of their favourite bugs is not fixed, and 
think "Now is the time to make an effort to get this bug fixed."

It has been so long since the last relase that I think there is a bit of a 
feeling among many people that it is almost not worth attempting any fix 
because it is not going to go anywhere.  Personally, the main reason why I am 
not doing much is because I'm not good at motivating myself; I tend to do some 
work when somebody else mentions that it needs doing, or when somebody else 
posts a patch that sort-of does it, and there is not much activity on this 
mailing list to hold my attention.

It would be nice, of course, to have more fixes in version 2.5.2, but fixes are 
not being made quickly.  If we keep waiting, a few of us will make a few more 
fixes in CVS, slowly, and the rest of the world will still be waiting.

This falls short of Stepan's plan for version 2.5.2 in 
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-grep/2005-03/msg00049.html>, but there's 
no harm in calling the result of those things 2.5.3 instead.  There's no reason 
to think that releasing the current version now will cause those further fixes 
to be delayed, except by the few hours of work required to make a release.

Thoughts?  Would Stepan be prepared to make the release?


Here is my first attempt at listing the changes in CVS.  The dates are just 
there to help me review the changes.  For example, instead of "Fix off-by-one 
error in prpending()" I want to discover and say what the user-visible effect is.

These are the user-visible changes since Grep 2.5.1 (2002-03-26),
distilled from Changelog.
### Need to check and note whether a regression test is present for each fix.

        Fix and update documentation and help text.

        Fix or disable some regression tests which were failing; add some more.

2005-04-29
        Fix bug #9768: "echo FOO | grep -io FoO" gave no output; should
        print "FOO".
2005-04-12
        Fix a seg-fault in "-o -i": patch #1939.
2003-01-18
        Fix -i -o combination (Patch from Tim Waugh)

2005-04-28
        Fix a DFA bug whereby a bracket "[" was matched by the
        pattern "[[:alpha:]]" in UTF-8 locales.  Patch #3800.

2005-04-27
        Fix a bug reported in patch #1834 whereby "grep -Fw"
        would miss matches after a non-word occurrence of the pattern.

2005-04-12
        Fix off-by-one error in prpending().  Patch #3840 by Claudio Fontana.

2005-04-11
        Fix bug #9519: "echo do^re | grep do^re" was failing to find a match.

2005-02-22
        Fix bug #4531: "echo a | grep -P '(?s)a.*'" would segfault.

2004-12-16
        From http://oss.software.ibm.com/linux/patches/?patch_id=25
        Patch for i18n correctness.


- Julian