Re: Latest snapshot and glibc regex support

[Matthew Burgess]

On Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:55:51 +0100, Jim Meyering <address@hidden> wrote:
> Matthew Burgess wrote:
>> A while ago Linux From Scratch added the '--without-included-regex'
>> flag to grep's configure invocation in order to fix the behaviour of
>> grep -i' (see http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/changeset/8688).
> 
> It's good that you mentioned that configure option.
> I haven't been testing with it, just tried,
> (thus forcing grep to use Fedora 12's glibc-2.11.1-1.x86_64)
> and saw two resulting test failures:
> 
>     FAIL: spencer1.sh
>     FAIL: spencer1-locale
> 
> The latter test uses the new framework, so I could easily
> see which are failing:
> 
>     Spencer test #109 failed (en_US.UTF-8)
>     Spencer test #110 failed (zh_CN)
>     Spencer test #111 failed (fr_FR.UTF-8)

Yes, the same tests fail for me too. And spencer1.sh fails on test 37
according to spencer1.sh.log

> There's at least a type limitation in glibc's interface.
> Here's the part of m4/regex.m4 that is probably triggering that:

Hacking on the configure test actually shows it's failing at:

/* Ensure that [b-a] is diagnosed as invalid. */
re_set_syntax (RE_SYNTAX_POSIX_EGREP);
memset (&regex, 0, sizeof regex);
s = re_compile_pattern ("a[b-a]", 6, &regex);
if (s == 0)
    return 1;

As we're using Glibc-2.11.1, that's to be expected, I guess.

I've seen the discussion of the gnulib patch that added this test at
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2010-02/msg00006.html but it
doesn't appear that it has been reverted yet.

If I comment out that test, then configure defaults to using the Glibc
regex implementation.  Obviously, that results in the test failures above
which I'll try to dig into after the weekend.

Regards,

Matt.