Re: g_regex in glib 1.3

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Joel Becker <jlbec@innerx.net> writes:

> Folks,
> 	Just a quick question about glib 1.3.  Are we planning to feature a
> g_regex set in any form?  The last I saw, there best 
> implementation was a pcre wrapper, and I like the idea of Perl REs.  But
> that begs the question of including pcre vs checking and falling back to
> POSIX vs checking and disabling vs checking and failing.  Is there any
> status on this?

I think the consensus so far is "yes, we want regular expressions".

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.

Last I spoke to the person working on the pcre wrapper, we discussed
how to handle the problem of handling avoiding name conflicts with
the official pcre.

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.

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

Regards,
                                        Owen