Author: Philip Hazel Date: To: Zack Weinberg CC: pcre-dev Subject: Re: [pcre-dev] Syntax compatibility among multiple copies of a
program, using different versions of PCRE internally
On Fri, 15 Feb 2008, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> 1) How realistic is the above worry? It doesn't *seem* like the regex
> syntax is changing that much between PCRE minor releases, but I don't
> know what's planned for the next few releases.
I don't have anything planned, but I don't know if Perl 5.10 (which is
coming RSN and has been for over a year, sadly) has any more new stuff
up its sleeve, as I have not checked recently. As long as it doesn't,
there are likely to be few, if any, changes.
> 2) Would it be possible to add defensive measures to the API to
> prevent the problem? For instance, could we have a new pcre_compile()
> variant that took a version number as an additional argument, and did
> not accept regex features added after that version, even if the
> library supported them?
Seems (a) a lot of work for small gain and (b) it would add a penalty on
performance for everyone, even if small, as well as additional code
clutter. But that's just my view. What do others think?
