[syslog-ng] migrate over to PCRE?

[Balazs Scheidler]

On Fri, 2008-07-04 at 12:16 +0200, Wolfram Schlich wrote:
> * Balazs Scheidler <bazsi at balabit.hu> [2008-06-30 16:42]:
> > Dear syslog-ng users,
> > 
> > The following text was written on my blog, but I'm reposting it here for
> > a wider audience to read:
> > 
> > As of now the development of the generic rewrite feature has been
> > completed in one of my private git repositories. The new code uses PCRE
> > and I'm somewhat undecided how to move forward with PCRE.
> > 
> > For those who might not know PCRE is an implementation of regular
> > expressions and is an acronym for "Perl Compatible Regular Expressions".
> > PCRE adds a lot more features and seems to perform better than its POSIX
> > equivalent.
> > 
> > So the situation is as follows:
> >       * various filters use POSIX regexps
> >       * rewrite uses PCRE
> > This is not a very consistent combination, thus I'm planning to add PCRE
> > support for filters too. The only question is whether it is needed to
> > have two independent regexp styles in syslog-ng in the long run.
> 
> PCRE only! Less hassle for you and less confusion for the users.
> PCRE is superior to POSIX regexps in several ways, so who needs
> POSIX REs when he can use PCRE these days anyway? :)

Great to know. In the meanwhile I have been confronted with the problem
of providing syslog-ng binaries for 24 platforms that we support today.
Adding a new build dependency (glib >= 2.14 and pcre in this case) is a
_lot_ of work.

So I've decided to support them both in the long run, implemented the
glue layer that will work with both RE implementations, but for now only
POSIX regexps are supported.

I hope to readd PCRE again once I can get this release out.

-- 
Bazsi