Re: --with-included-foo={yes,no} and which foo.h to use?

[Aharon Robbins]

> Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2005 14:05:19 +0200
> From: Stepan Kasal <address@hidden>
> Subject: Re: --with-included-foo={yes,no} and which foo.h to use?
> To: address@hidden
>
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 11:29:00AM +0100, Julian Foad wrote:
> > >   Big regex.[ch] update from latest glibc CVS libc/posix/.
> > 
> > It's not appropriate to use the latest development version of some code.  
> > Use the latest officially released version.  (Maybe that's what you meant, 
> > but it doesn't sound like it.)  If the latest released version isn't 
> > useable, please discuss.  Not using officially released versions of 
> > software nearly always leads to trouble at some time.
>
> In general, you are right.  But not in this case.  The development of
> regex in glibc is not wild, there are just bug fixes.
> And there is no point in missing a few non-risky bug fixes which are only
> in the latest CVS.
>
> And we plan to do active development of regex in the future on our side;
> that will have to be done relative to latest source.
>
> And, AFAIK, gawk and sed use latest code from glibc CVS, too.
>
> So I think that _in this case_ we should use the CVS version.
>
> Have a nice day,
>       Stepan

Yes, for gawk at least, I just grab the latest from the CVS archive at
whatever time I happen to be grabbing.

IMHO, glibc regex is stable and healthy. It's been in use in gawk for
several years now, and the problems got shaken out of it pretty early.
There may be subtle problems left, but I don't really think so, and I am
not really concerned in any case.

If dropping glibc regex into grep-cvs works and grep (a) passes its test
suite and (b) doesn't slow down significantly, I think you (general you)
should just go for it.

That's also the point of a beta release --- if you make a beta with the
new regex and things fail miserably out in the real world, you can back
out to the old regex.  I'll be very surprised, though, if that happens.

BTW, Stepan, "Catch-22" is the title of famous novel, from the 1970s,
I think.  The meaning of the phrase "It's a Catch-22" is something along
the lines of "no matter what you do, you can't win".

HTH,

Arnold