Re: [bug-grep] [OT] bye bye grep

[Tony Abou-Assaleh]

> > I do not quite agree with how the
> > development/maintainment is going on, as I often told
> > Stepan, so I will try to find another project which
> > needs some help.
>
> Oh.  Certainly we have a problem with Grep's maintenance over the last few
> years, but I didn't know you had some ideas on how we could work better.  I
> would like to hear your ideas (in private if you prefer).

I am highly interested too. Please share you comments with the list.

While we are on the subject, I'll chip in too :O)

My original motivation in joining the grep development list was to help
incorporate new features from other grep-like tools, and maybe on the way
fix a few bugs.

I was shocked, but understanding, to the slow rate at which patches are
applied, even after the maintenance started picking up again. The last few
weeks have witnessed a dramatic change, and I am happy for it.

Although I am far less experienced or active than Claudio is, I find it
discouraging that new features are not being accepted, even though there
seems to be a general consensus that a lot of grep code needs a complete
rewrite and many of current patches will be lost.

On the other hand, there are benefits in terms of stability in being
conservative, and I see value in making short-term fixes. However,
frequent bug-fix releases are necessary for users to benefit from these
quick fixes.

Solution? I've been thinking about it for a while and came to the
conclusion that we really need to create a new development branch,
perhaps even with new maintainers (if current ones are too busy to handle
2 branches). Maybe it is time we started working on grep 3.0.0 with the
philosophy of frequent CVS check-ins even if that breaks things that we
anticipate to fix soon.

Cheers,

TAA

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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/
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