Re: [Gnu-arch-users] GNU Arch status update

[John A Meinel]

Ben Finney wrote:

> On 06-Feb-2005, Tom Lord wrote:
>  
>
> > There are (at most) three regexp engines in the free software world
> > with anywhere near enough performance to work for `inventory'.  Of
> > those, only 1 is in a free version of libc (and, of the three, with
> > considerable respect for its author, i must note that it is the one I
> > think most likely to have performance problems for uses within arch
> > but outside of `inventory' itself).
> >
> > In other words, the decision to use the system regex is pragmatically
> > equivalent to the decision to rely on GNU libc.
> >    
>
> Is your objection based on libc's regex engine, or on other aspects of
> libc?
>
> If the dependency was on a separate-from-libc version of GNU's regex
> library, would that be satisfactory?
>  

Gnu libc is not available on all platforms (Solaris, Windows, etc). So 
depending on it reduces the portability of the program. Probably if you 
know of a GNU regex that is portable, and can either be bundled with 
tla, or is likely to already be present on the machine, then you would 
be okay.

Just avoid the libneon problem, where it was removed from the source, 
but there was no configure step warning you that it wasn't found. So the 
only way you know is that the build fails.

But then again, I'm not Tom, so you'll have to hear from him.
John
=:->

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