Re: AW: [HACKERS] regular expressions from hell

> As it happens, rx-1.9 is not under either the GPL, or the LGPL. The author
> offers a range of free and commercial licenses. It appears that we could
> use this software, but the safest bet would be to contact the author and ask
> as the license documents are not as well spelled out as the Gnu licences and
> I may have misunderstood them.

David, I received this from the maintainer of our current regex library.
Seems like rx may be too buggy for us. But we do need a faster regex
library.

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> Henry, will the new code you write be in the public domain, or only part
> of BSDI?

The new regex code will be under essentially the same redistribution terms
as the old stuff (in fact, slightly more generous). BSDI didn't end up
contributing to this particular project, and the folks who did were all
happy with open redistribution.

I should clarify that this code isn't "to be written" -- it already exists,
although I'm not entirely happy with it yet and want to limit distribution
until it's tidied up somewhat.

> Would you recommend we replace our regex stuff with something else?

My only real competitor :-) right now appears to be the GNU rx package,
and I have heard enough grumbling about it that I hesitate to recommend
it for general use. It's faster but it has problems, is my impression;
I have not examined it closely.

> Do you have any patches you would like us to test?

Nothing quite yet. Incidentally, the new code is a from-scratch
reimplementation, not just patches to the 4.4 one.

Henry Spencer
henry(at)zoo(dot)toronto(dot)edu

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