A small group of developers have been discussing a proposal for a
completely new API for PCRE. The old API has been more-or-less
compatibly extended for over 15 years, but has now reached a point where
what needs to be changed cannot be done compatibly, so it seems like a
good time for a complete overhaul.
The current proposal is available as a PDF here:
ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/Testing/PCRE2_proposal.pdf
The
ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk site is being moved to new hardware, and may
suffer from temporary outages in the process. For this reason, I have
put another copy of the document here:
http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/ph10/PCRE2_proposal.pdf
This is still just a proposal. It is not yet fixed; indeed there are
some questions in the document about alternative ways of doing things.
All comments and suggestions on this proposal are welcomed. Please post
them to the list so that everybody can join in the discussion. There is
no great hurry, but we do want to keep the process moving.
The (rough) development plan is to release 8.34 fairly soon, with all
the most recent fixes, and at that point to freeze development of the
8.xx releases and start work on 9.0 with the new API. This is likely to
take quite a few months, as we plan to tidy the code as much as possible
as well as changing the API. Only very serious bugs in 8.34 will be
considered for fixing - my hope is that there will not be any. :-)
Philip
--
Philip Hazel
