Re: [pcre-dev] Kudos on PCRE 7.2...

On Wed, Aug 29, 2007 at 07:39:50PM -0700, Robert Roessler wrote:
> Mr Philip (and Bob and Daniel), I am unhappy to see the PCRE project
> head in the direction of more complexity in the build environment for
> little (if any) gain (obviously MY opinion)... but seriously, even if
> there is no concern for Windows at all (which doesn't seem to quite be
> the case), switching away from a structure which could be trivially
> built with only a make and a compiler (or an IDE handling both
> functions) doesn't make a whole lot of sense from an engineering
> standpoint, does it?
>
> Yes, I *can* still build it with Visual Studio 2005 (which does happen
> to include a serious and high-quality C/C++ compiler), but the
> underlying model seems to be going more and more to requiring/assuming
> you are *of course* using auto-this and auto-that... and the answers I
> received from Bob and Daniel reflect that (but I am still appreciative
> of the time it took to give them).
>
> It's not like we are trying to build an operating system (or a Mozilla
> FireFox) here... PCRE has historically been a clean, contained
> *library*, without exotic build requirements (or the mindset that goes
> with them), and it somehow managed to become an influential building
> block in lots of software nonetheless... :)
>
> OK, semi-rant-mode OFF (well, mostly).

Robert,

Please, calm down.

It was decided to move pcre to the autotools build system so that you
could build it on many platforms, in many different configurations,
and users of pcre could do this _easily_.

It was also decided to add the CMake build system, (which I know nothing
about), so that pcre users could build pcre _easily_ on platforms when
used cl (and other compilers?).

So, the point is, to make your life easy. Instead of complaining, why
don't you describe why your life is not easy, and we'll attempt to make
it easy again.

Maybe it is possible you could contribute a Makefile.static makefile
that would build pcre as a static library. It could contain a bunch of
simple commands to do this.

> And then there is the changing of other symbols like PCREPOSIX_STATIC in
> 7.2 becoming PCRE_STATIC in 7.3? Things like this make life harder for
> the consumers of PCRE, and what did it buy?

What about changing the symbol PCREPOSIX_STATIC -> PCRE_STATIC made your
life harder?

> I know it is quite unlikely, but *maybe* some of the changes that went
> into the [unfortunate] 7.3 release could be carefully reviewed - and the
> ones that aren't bugfixes reversed? I would be happy to do the edits... ;)

What makes you think that they were not carefully reviewed?
What exactly would you like reversed?

Bob Rossi