On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 6:46 AM, Branko Čibej <[email protected]> wrote: > On 20.09.2012 23:42, Stefan Sperling wrote: >> On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 02:30:30PM -0700, Bert Huijben wrote: >>> Fnmatch support is in apr(-util?) and has known access/performance patterns, >>> so we might be able to move the search handling to the server in the future >>> for performance reasons. >>> >>> Complete regular expression support would at least require using a new third >>> party library and moving it to the server is not really possible because >>> complete regular expression processing can be way to expensive. >> What he said. I was about to write the same response :) >> >> I *did* search for regex stuff in APR and other existing dependencies >> and then settled on fnmatch. httpd has a regex engine but it's not >> part of APR for some reason. I wouldn't have a problem using that >> in the client if it were available, but it isn't. > > HTTPD uses PCRE, which has a BSD license. We could use it, but I'd > prefer to have a much better reason for doing so. > > (e.g., "svn grep" could be such a reason)
Another reason might be 'svn diff -F RE' support (for matching a "function line" with RE, like the "show-c-function" option), analogous to the GNU diff option. See also this thread: http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2012-01/0400.shtml ("regexp matching in svn?") There were some other suggestions made in that thread: regex for svn:ignore and for authz files. Anyway ... those might all be small reasons, but maybe they start to add up, and the lack of a regex engine is holding us back on certain features (none of which *have* to be added in case we would have regex support, of course -- they all have their own design problems and implementation work). -- Johan
