Re: g_regex in glib 1.3

[Joel Becker <jlbec innerx net>]

On Wed, Dec 29, 1999 at 06:22:06PM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> My opinion is:
>  - Perl regular expressions would be nice
>  - We _cannot_ have multiple flavors of regular expression depending
>    on the way GLib is compiled. It has to be perl-style and always
>    perl-style or POSIX and always POSIX.

	The second point is, I agree, imperative.  The point of glib is that
it works the same on all platforms, and a regex that works on DU must
work on Linux, so perl one place and POSIX another always fails.

> What I told him (I wish I could remember who "him" was), was that 
> it would be best to simply use the official version of pcre, but
> if it isn't (and he seemed to think it wasn't) and we were going
> to include a copy of pcre, then we needed to make sure we renamed
> any exported functions to avoid conflicting with pcre.

	"him" was happybob (scottw@cgibuilder.com).  No, I can't remember
his last name.  Personally, I would not want glib to have any external
dependancies other than libc, so I would vote for an included version of
pcre.  This would require a rename of all of pcre's functions, lest an
overzealous dynamic linker get pcre-only functions from glib, and not
libpcre.  Unless, of course, someone has a creative way to make the
linker ignore included pcre api in the libglib .so.

> The API for a regular expression addition to GLib certainly has
> not been finalized at this point.

	We agree we want it, but with this lack of finality, is it a 1.3
issue or a 1.[59] issue?

Joel

-- 

"In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot 
 of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a 
 bad move."
        - Douglas Adams

                                  jlbec@evilplan.org
                                  http://ocala.cs.miami.edu/~jlbec