[syslog-ng] Thoughts on patterndb syntax

[Lars Kellogg-Stedman]

>> both problems; messages can be wrapped for readability and you can
>> still include arbitrary stretches of whitespace in the expression.
>
> Hmm... and what about multi-line messages?

That's why I'm suggesting this as an optional behavior -- that way (a)
it doesn't affect existing configurations, and (b) you can actually
put multi-line patterns in place if you need them.  If you know you
need to match multi-line patterns, don't enable whitespace collapsing.

Another idea would be to adopt the syntax used by Perl and Python's
"extended" regular expressions -- this requires that any whitespace be
specified explicitly.  So this:

  this \s is \s a \s test

Is the same as:

  this \s
  is \s
  a \s test

And of course you can make newlines explicit via \n and so forth.
Actually, the more we wander down this path the more I wish I could
just use PCRE-style regular expressions as long as I was willing to
put up with the performance impact.