Re: CVS commit: othersrc/external/bsd/agcre

[Valery Ushakov <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost>]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2026 at 08:38:47 -0700, Alistair Crooks wrote:

> On Wed, 14 Oct 2026 at 16:36, Valery Ushakov <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost> wrote:
>
> > Shall we perhaps make it (the new code) our usr.bin/grep?
> 
> I've always resisted this in the past, as the Perl escapes are just the
> ones that I use myself, they're not the complete set, and might make this
> whole thing "non standard", FSVO standard. It's also why I gave it an
> egotistical fluffery name, rather than calling it some form of grep :)
> 
> But, at the same time, I see egrep hasn't changed in 9 years since I wrote
> the README, and so, right now, I definitely wouldn't expose any regular
> expressions to the internet without making sure they couldn't be abused. We
> also don't have any wchar_t expressions in base, and I can imagine people
> getting confused by some things in the library, like the virtual
> instructions it can dump, or the execution tracing.
> 
> I might try a short experiment to use the new code in a build.sh run, and
> see what happens - that's where previous attempts (with tre) have failed,
> mainly due to the distinction between basic and extended regexps, IIRC.

Much appreciated.  The grep situation is currently very sad.  Out gpl2
grep is _very_ old and it's utf-8 performance sucks massively.  A
modern amd64 machine might hide that, but even on a 1GHz g4 grep -r
/usr/include is excruciatingly slow.  Unfortunately, the fixes for
that are in the gpl3 version only.

Thanks.

-uwe