Lots of bug fixes; possible release [was: Question about "-m1 -A99" tests in foad1.sh]

[Julian Foad]

Charles Levert wrote:
> What I have solved:

Excellent.  I'm very impressed with your continuing work on this, Charles.

>    -- The "egrep" and "fgrep" script vs. program
>       situation.  I have a solution with programs
>       (no scripts or argv[0]-recognition)
>       where those two are smaller than the full
>       featured "grep", yet still standalone
>       (much smaller for "fgrep", which doesn't
>       use the dfa or regex stuff).

That's historically been a touchy subject, but I like the sound of your 
solution.  I think it is acceptable that "fgrep" wouldn't support "-E" or "-G", 
and "egrep" wouldn't support "-F" or "-G".

>    -- All situations with various anchor
>       types (^, \<) not working properly
>       with --color and --only-matching.

Excellent.

>    -- An obscure bug about towlower()ing
>       multi-octet characters that change
>       octet-length while doing so, in main().

Excellent.

> If I prepare patches for these, would they stand
> a good chance of being accepted for CVS commit at
> this point in time?  I ask because preparing nice
> patches can be as effort consuming as solving
> the problems in the first place.  And it has to
> be redone every time something else that touches
> the same lines is checked in.

I'd love to get them applied soonish, but whether it is reasonable "at this 
point in time" depends on how complex they are.

> What I rely on to get other things right:
>
>    -- The remaining stuff from the
>       Red Hat/Fedora Core patches.

That would be a good place to start.  Last time I looked, I was unable to 
determine whether and why some of those remaining patches correctly fixed what 
they claimed to fix, or in some cases unable even to determine what they 
claimed to fix.

If you are prepared to re-submit those patches in a clearly understandable 
form, then I'll undertake to review them.  I suppose in the course of your work 
on the above bugs, you have implicitly accepted the correctness of these Red 
Hat patches, but I will not be happy for us to apply them if they are not 
understandable.

>    -- The regex stuff that's in gnulib CVS.

Yikes - that's quite a big change, is it not?  Still, I accept that we need to 
do it some time soon.


I have recently been thinking that it's high time we released Grep 2.5.2 with 
the current round of relatively simple fixes before going on to more drastic 
code changes.  Such a release would provide a clean base for a lot of bug 
fixing, potentially by new contributors, and would revive interest and 
confidence in the software.  Currently, I suspect a fair number of people 
around the world are beginning to give up hope and drifting towards other 
software where they can.

I know there is a significant amount of work in making a release, but I could 
do some of it with guidance.  Although it's been years since the last one, and 
that fact would seem to make another few months unimportant, I think we might 
get into a real mess and much bigger delay if we start to make drastic changes 
to the source and then find unforseen difficulties without having released a 
stable version beforehand.

Would you be prepared to help with such a release before applying all your good 
bug fixing work?

Alternatively, could we at least create a "version 2.5.x" bug-fixing branch 
from the current CVS code, and then continue developing the mainline (trunk) as 
heading towards version 2.6?  I'm not really keen to work with branches in CVS, 
but it would be better than just continuing with ever bigger changes.

- Julian