Re: [Chicken-users] Last two snapshots (3.3.5 and 3.3.6) are broken

[Ivan Raikov]

Hi Aleksej,

   Thanks for the patch. I have removed the pcre.h dependencies from
the regex targets altogether, as pcre.h is supposed to be immutable,
anyway. trunk now seems to build fine with or without USE_HOST_PCRE,
but give it a try and let me know if it works for you. The next
development release, 3.3.7, will include those changes, and will be
available in about 6 hours or so.

   Your point about bundled pcre is well-taken, and in fact the Debian
package is also built with USE_HOST_PCRE=1 for precisely that
reason. Unfortunately, some older Debian distributions still use pcre
6.x, whose header file is missing some definitions used by the regex
unit in Chicken, so it is not always possible to use host pcre. I am
actually in favor of dropping the use of pcre altogether, and adopting
Alex Shinn's irregex library in the Chicken core, because
"Perl-compatible" regular expressions are full of godawful hacks, and
because the pcre library itself is an overflow vulnerability waiting
to happen [1]. That is usually the case with large, complex C
libraries, and I think it is a bad idea in general to include
third-party C code in core Chicken.

   -Ivan

[1] http://www.usenix.org/event/woot08/tech/full_papers/drewry/drewry_html/
   

Aleksej Saushev <address@hidden> writes:

> Hello!
>
> Last two snapshots are broken, the build with host PCRE fails,
> currently I've patched it (see the patch below), but I want to
> raise the issue once again.
>
> Please, don't build against bundled pcre, at least for BSD's,
> the policy on all of them (known to me) is to build against
> common libraries, not package-internal ones.
>
> It would be nice, if bundled pcre was dropped at all, this will
> ease maintanance and testing, and prevent you from making such
> stupid mistakes.