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Message-ID: <20160616152526.GH10893@brightrain.aerifal.cx>
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2016 11:25:27 -0400
From: Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org>
To: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: tre regex in single regcomp.c file

On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 05:12:24PM +0200, Szabolcs Nagy wrote:
> * Julien Ramseier <j.ramseier@...il.com> [2016-06-16 16:31:12 +0200]:
> > Any reason most of the TRE regex sources have been merged in a single 3k lines 
> > file (regcomp.c)?
> 
> creating internal interfaces for implementing a single
> self-contained public function (regcomp) is bad design.
> 
> (even if you split the code up, all the code will be
> linked together if the public api symbol is referenced
> otherwise none of the code will be used, so you just
> create linking overhead and headaches around the internal
> api between the source files which must obey posix
> namespace rules etc.)

Yes, the main motivation was to get rid of external namespace
pollution without renaming all the internal functions to be
__-prefixed, and also to allow inter-procedural analysis
optimizations.

> > This makes diff-ing them against the original sources[0] very painful.
> 
> the original tre is not suitable for libc use, at least
> the namespace issues, alloca use, aborts, debug printfs
> should be fixed.
> 
> there were various other conformance issues and features
> not relevant to the c runtime, the parser was rewritten e.g.
> http://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/commit/?id=ec1aed0a144b3e00e16eeb142c9d13362d6048e7
> 
> so diffing would be painful anyway.
> 
> > Would a patch to split them back be accepted?
> 
> unlikely
> 
> it's much more likely that the regex engine will be rewritten.

If the goal is to send improvements or fixes upstream (that would mean
picking maintenance of TRE back up yourself, I think) the right way
would be to read musl's git logs and follow the changes that way.

Rich

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