Re: [PATCH] Permit the use of regular expression match and replace in posting styles.

[Mike Kupfer <mike.kupfer@xemacs.org>]

Ted Zlatanov wrote:

> We need you to find out how to make `match-substitute-replacement' work
> in XEmacs, basically.  If you need to copy what it does (the full
> function was posted already) that's fine, but it's better if we can use
> XEmacs's builtins.

Okay.  XEmacs can't currently use the given implementation because it's
GPLv3, and XEmacs hasn't yet made the move to GPLv3.  (There has been
work in this area, but it's not quite done.)  But that also means that
XEmacs can't ship new versions of Gnus, because they, too, are GPLv3.

One suggestion that I got was for someone to reimplement
match-substitute-replacement from scratch (i.e., just working from the
documentation).  But AFAICT, XEmacs's string-matching functions are
pretty much the same as Emacs's, so we'd probably end up with something
that looks a lot like the implementation that you posted.  And frankly,
my Lisp skills are such that I'm reluctant to tackle this.

In the short term, I suppose that you could include
match-substitute-replacement with Gnus itself.  That would presumably
satisfy XEmacs users who get Gnus directly from gnus.org.  I did some
light testing, and it looks like match-substitute-replacement will just
work on XEmacs.  How does that sound?

mike