Re: [bug-grep] Plan for grep

[Tony Abou-Assaleh]

I was waiting for such a plan long enough. Thanks Stepan!

I can work on #3 for 2.5.2. The test suite patch that I submitted would
require very minor changes to accommodate for the other tests.

On the long term, I'd like to make -P not experimental because so much can
be done with it, especially when combined with -z (after some modification
to the source to make it actually work). I have other ideas for 2.6
describe in a report at:

http://flame.cs.dal.ca/~taa/papers/abou-assaleh_csci6306b.pdf

Cheers,

TAA

--------------------------------------------------
Tony Abou-Assaleh
Ph.D. Candidate, Faculty of Computer Science
Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada, B3H 1W5
Fax:   902-492-1517
Email: address@hidden
WWW:   http://www.cs.dal.ca/~taa/
---------------------[THE END]--------------------


On Tue, 8 Mar 2005, Stepan Kasal wrote:

> Hello,
>
> On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 02:09:54AM -0500, Charles Levert wrote:
> > Stepan:  It would be nice to devise a summary roadmap
> > including an identification of things that should go in a
> > 2.5.2 milestone release and of other things that should go
> > in a 2.6.0 milestone release (or any in between).
> > Maybe bug fixes vs. new functionality, enhanced performance,
> > or heavy refactoring.
>
> yes, I should outline that.
>
> I did one mistake: I wanted to react promptly to newcomers, like
> you and Claudio, in order to give a sense that the grep community
> is alive.  In fact, I should rather spend my time doing things which
> I promised long ago.
>
> I'm afraid that most of the patches currently on savannah will have
> to wait some time.  I apologize to you, who invested your effort to
> develop them.  Details below.
>
> 2.5.2
> =====
> Our main goal for grep 2.5.2 is to get sane performance with utf-8.
> That can be achieved by the patches written by Tim Waugh for Red Hat.
>
> Besides that, I can do some changes in the infrastructure, so that
> I can "breathe":
>
> 1) rewrite the configure.in script, perhaps also Makefile.am
> 2) set up for gnulib-tool --import
> 3) improve the test ifrastructure
>
> I'm afraid I have to do 1) myself, and it is closely tied with 2),
> so they probably have to be done together.
>
> If someone likes awk and wanted to help with 3), it could help.
> In short, there should be only one awk script for .test-->.script
> rule.  The header of each .test file should state some details,
> like which command to run, eg. "grep -E".  We also heve to invent
> a way to collect the test cases for non-C locales; either by
> running the whole set twice, or by creating a separate .test files.
> The "make check" goal should run this, if the computer has a locale
> like en_US.utf8 installed.
>
> After completing these, we can:
> 4) check in the patches for the sync of dfa.c with GNU awk
> 5) other small patches which wait for a test case
> 6) process the RedHat patches
>
> After 6), I should repeat Tim's measurments and see whether the utf8
> performance improved.
>
> Independently, I'd like to see
> 7) some _minimal_ cleanup of the grep(), grepdir(), recursion
>    (the "main loop") and fix --directories=read
> 8) mark the -P option clearly as "experimental";
>
> Well, that'll be perhaps enough for a release.
>
> 2.5.3
> =====
> Fix the combinations:
>  * -i -o
>  * --colour -i
>  * -o -b
>  * -o and zero-width matches
> Go through the bug list im my mailbox and fix fixable.
> Fix bugs reported with 2.5.2.
>
> 2.6.x
> =====
> The following should go here:
>  - upgrade to current regex.c from glibc,
>  - new functionality,
>  - fixes for -P,
>  - heavy refactoring.
>
> OK, we have plan.  I'm afraid I should invest my time to these points
> rather then to trying to be a good netizen and answer mails.
>
> Have a nice day,
>       Stepan
>
>
>