[Privoxy-devel] pcre2 support

[Fabian Keil]

Roland Rosenfeld <roland at spinnaker.de> wrote on 2021-11-18:

> Did anybody of you think about supporting pcre2 (from
> https://pcre.org) as a substitute of the old pcre library in privoxy?

I was aware of pcre2's existence but I didn't make any
concrete plans, yet.

It's also not clear to me if we should migrate to pcre2
of to another regular expression library.

On the TODO list there is:
| 79) Evaluate pcre alternatives.
https://www.privoxy.org/gitweb/?p=privoxy.git;a=blob;f=TODO;hb=HEAD#l180

I consider pcre2 an alternative but there are others
and I'm not familiar enough with them to quickly decide
if they are better or worse for our purposes.

Maybe migrating to pcre2 is less work but at the moment
but I'm not sure about this either.

> Debian is planning to remove the classic pcre (8.39) library in the
> next release (Bookworm) and substitute it by pcre2.

Is there a time frame?

Is python 2.7 already gone?

It's still part of the FreeBSD ports even though it was
supposed to expire on 2020-12-31, nearly a year ago.

Due to applications like Mailman (which we also use for
the Privoxy mailing lists) it hasn't been deleted yet.

I'd expect pcre to have even more consumers than python 2.7.

> > PCRE2 is a re-working of the original PCRE1 library to provide an
> > entirely new API. Since its initial release in 2015, there has been
> > further development of the code and it now differs from PCRE1 in
> > more than just the API. There are new features, and the internals
> > have been improved. The original PCRE1 library is now obsolete and
> > no longer maintained.
> 
> So since pcre1 is now obsolete, it may be a good idea to migrate
> privoxy to pcre2...

I agree that it could be a good idea but it's not clear to
me how much time we have left.

At the moment I'm still sitting on a couple of other patches
that I have to send to Ian for review so I can get the money
from our SPI account.

I hope to be able to get this done soonish,
hopefully before the end of the year.

Fabian
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