There are several places where regular expressions would be useful in Subversion. Off hand, the new log --search feature and svn:ignore properties feel like they'd be use candidates for regexs, and they could probably also apply to authz rules eventually. I'm sure there are more.
Historically, the argument against using regexes in Subversion was that they would be a potential DoS target, or could lead to unexpected performance problems. However, I recently ran across a new regex engine, RE2, which claims to have linear time complexity in the size of the input with the ability to also limit memory consumption[1]. These come at the expenses of a couple of less-used regex features, and it feels like it'd be a good fit for Subversion. There are a few downsides: * RE2 is written in C++; we'd need a C wrapper to use it within Subversion. * RE2 packages don't exist for a number of platforms, though we might be able to embedded it in Subversion. * RE2 doesn't claim to compile on Windows. :) Anyway, I was just wondering what folks feelings were about this possibility, and whether it's finally time to start thinking about proper regex support within Subversion. -Hyrum [1] https://code.google.com/p/re2/