Re: suggested patches for regex routines from gawk

[Roland McGrath <roland at hack dot frob dot com>]

As to paperwork, contributions to libc need an FSF assignment just like
you've done many of for other things, so you know the drill.

As to the specifics of regex, I think the starting place is that we'd like
to get regex (along with everything else) re-harmonized with gnulib first
and then have particular changes packages want hashed out jointly between
libc, gnulib, and package maintainers like you.

For both libc and gnulib, when posting changes you need to include both
GNU-style ChangeLog fragments, and an explanation of each change that is
not completely obvious.  Collections of changes like what I see in your
patch should usually be split up into numerous separate changes where only
one kind of change (even if a pervasive one) will be in each commit.

I suspect Paul knows the most both about the regex code and about the state
of differences and reharmonization of the gnulib and libc versions and so
he is probably the best person to review the technical details of your
substantive changes.

For libc, we would like not to think about further divergence from the
gnulib version until the reharmonization gets done.  So while we'd take
fixes for significant bugs per se in libc regex promptly, we don't really
want to think about changes like yours until after someone gets around to
doing the reharmonization work first.  Whether that means you should wait
for that to get done, or it means you can just get your changes into the
gnulib version sooner and put the burden of justifying them for libc on
whoever eventually takes on the reharmonization job, is pretty much up to
you and Paul (i.e. gnulib regex maintainers).


Thanks,
Roland