Re: Internal regex.h is always used

[Reuben Thomas]

On 15 September 2010 02:43, Bruno Haible <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Reuben,
>
>> #include "regex.h"
>> uses the included regex.h, not the system one.
>
> Yes.
>
>> There are obvious potential problems with this: if the
>> ABI changes you could end up with a header that doesn't match the
>> linked code, and even without that you can end up thinking you have
>> features (e.g. syntax bits) which are not in fact available in the
>> code.
>
> Yes. But the ABI is stable: it's the glibc ABI. The problems have only
> been theoretical, not practical, so far. Or can you show a factual problem?

So, you're saying that all the features in the gnulib version of GNU
regex have been in glibc for sufficiently long that I am very unlikely
ever to use a system with a sufficiently old version of glibc that it
is lacking a feature (e.g. a particular syntax flag) that is present
in GNU regex? Or that in this case, the gnulib tests will identify
this problem and force --with-included-regex? If so, I agree, there is
no real problem here (other than for me: I modified regex.h to add my
RE_PLAIN, and then found that if I tested for RE_PLAIN I could still
end up with the system library; however, this is, I agree, a rare
case).

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