bug#17246: grep-2.19 planning

[Paolo Bonzini]

Il 11/05/2014 03:44, Jim Meyering ha scritto:
> > From my point of view, now would be a good time for grep 2.19.  Today I
> > finished wading through the bug reports and fixing the ones that seem
> > pressing.  The remaining unresolved bugs are either lower-than-normal
> > priority, or have to do with grep --color (which is low priority for me, as
> > the coloring stuff is a mess and anyway I'm more of a monochrome guy
> > myself).
>
> I agree.  Thanks to both you and Norihiro for all of the fine work.
> I'm preparing a pre-release snapshot now.

I didn't get an answer as to _what_ exactly is simplified by the patches 
to introduce the wrapper shell scripts.  Have you evaluated the effect 
of the patch on things like help messages or error messages for things 
like "egrep -F" or "fgrep -E"?

I honestly do not see any rationale for this change was "systems without 
good shells are lame, we might as well break it".  However, POSIX shell 
might imply good shell, but that is not a necessary and sufficient 
condition.  There are good shells that are not POSIX and egrep/fgrep 
would not break on those systems.

I still would prefer to defer this change to 2.20 or later.  There is 
already a _lot_ of meat in 2.19, and I'd rather avoid cumulating two 
possible sources of bug reports.  Once the dust has set on the search 
routines, we can evaluate the pros and cons of rewriting egrep/fgrep 
from C to shell script.

Paolo