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

[Alistair Crooks <alistaircrooks%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Wed, 14 Oct 2026 at 16:36, Valery Ushakov <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 14, 2026 at 22:25:21 +0000, Alistair G. Crooks wrote:
>
> > Module Name:  othersrc
> > Committed By: agc
> > Date:         Wed Oct 14 22:25:21 UTC 2026
> >
> > Removed Files:
> >       othersrc/external/bsd/agcre: Makefile README namespace.mk
> [...]
> > Log Message:
> > Remove this old code, it's been superceded - see pkgsrc/devel/libagcre
> > and pkgsrc/textproc/agcre
>
> 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.

Best,
Al