Re: Applying outstanding patches [bug-grep]

[Charles Levert]

* On Wednesday 2005-04-13 at 20:10:41 +0200, Claudio Fontana wrote:
> 
> --- Julian Foad <address@hidden> wrote:
> > I have finally got around to spending some time on
> > Grep, and have started by 
> > going through the issues in the Savannah tracker and
> > resolving those that are 
> > easy to resolve.  This includes applying patches
> > that are simple and/or 
> > testable and that won't get in the way of applying
> > some of the larger patches 
> > that are waiting.
> > 
> > Stepan Kasal wrote: "Our main goal for grep 2.5.2 is
> > to get sane performance 
> > with utf-8."  While that is an important issue, my
> > main goal for the short term 
> > is to fix as many correctness bugs as can be fixed
> > without making very large 
> > (and therefore inherently dangerous) changes.
> 
> I would suggest freezing the Red Hat UTF8 speedup
> patch. I studied it with attention and it addresses a
> real performance problem, but I think it needs some
> restructuring to avoid code dups, and generalize some
> functionality in appropriate functions to be more
> maintenable in the future.

Here's my 0.02 CAD.

I think that, given the current freeze we've
been in for some time, any motion (not even
necessarily proven progress) is good and we
should go ahead and apply the long-in-waiting
Red Hat patches.

Remember the obvious (IMHO):

  -- CVS is supposed to be bleeding edge and
     anybody who downloads it should know
     what they're getting themselves into.
     Users should look in the official releases
     for stability.

  -- It's even ok to break the CVS build, as long
     as it's detected and fixed within a few
     hours.

  -- Things that build don't have to be perfect
     the moment they enter CVS.  There are
     several ways to correct them afterwards:

     -- by incremental improvements that build
        upon the first commits;

     -- by first backing out of commits that
        turned out to have been unequivocal
        mistakes after having received some
        testing, and then applying newer cleaner
        patches from scratch based on gained
        experience.