Hello all,
I've reviewed BSD grep based on your comments and the bug reports I
received. The new version is committed to the ports tree as
textproc/bsdgrep and there is a base patch available:
http://kovesdan.org/patches/grep-base.diff
I've asked portmgr to test my patch on pointyhat if they have available
resources, but haven't got an answer yet. In the meantime, I'd like to
ask for your comments and feedback on BSD grep. Currently, it is
supposed to be highly compatible with GNU grep, except from some
differences in the handling of the regular expressions. This comes from
the different manners in the GNU regex library and in our regex library,
thus it would be very difficult to fix at the level of grep. For
example, GNU grep accepts empty subexpressions in regexes, like "(|b)",
but BSD grep does not. I don't know how often such non-standard
constructions are used, we need to see the results of a portbuild first,
but I know that there are some in portmaster. That's why I CC'd Doug,
I'm interested in his comments.
There are another question to discuss. GNU grep supports -P for Perl
regexes based on PCRE. This is not available in FreeBSD, though, but I'd
be glad to add it to BSD grep. This would require us to import PCRE to
base. It is BSD-licensed and maybe other tools would make use of it in
the future. I don't know how this can cooperate with the ports version
and how difficult it would be to maintain it in base. I remember that
Perl was removed from base due to this overhead. What do you think about
this? I've CC'd krion@, the maintainer of devel/pcre, maybe he can
comment on this.
Thanks,
Gabor
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