Re: Solaris 10 regcomp() does not handle simple whatis query

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Peter,

Peter Bray wrote on Fri, Apr 03, 2015 at 11:02:16PM +1100:

> I am having trouble viewing the GMAME web archive of the mailing
> list, so please excuse me if this post is a repeat of a known issue.

Duplicate reports are better than missing ones, so unless you are
completely sure something is known, always speak up.  Even dupes
are sometimes useful because they help to adjust priorities.

> I was investigating mdocml on a Solaris 10 (X86_64) system and
> discovered that the latest release does not compile, but the latest
> CVS 2015-04-01 does :-) Many thanks to those responsible!

You are welcome.  That would be me, various people reporting issues,
and the friendly folks from OpenCSW who provide testing opportunities
on their build cluster.

> My testing shows that Solaris 10's regcomp() can not handle the
> character class used by mdocml's whatis(1): for example: the query
> 'whatis' generates "[[:<:]]whatis[[:>:]]" which gives the error
> "regcomp: invalid character class type", as shown below

I dimly remember hearing that before, and indeed [[:<:]] is not
required by POSIX but a BSD extension.

> Depending on the complexity, maybe a BSD version of regcomp() could be
> included with mdocml, to get the desired functionality and not have to
> reduce the functionality currently available to mdocml users.

Bundling a full regular expression library seems a bit much,
that code isn't exactly small.

> Alternatively, the code could make exceptions for broken (by the
> project's standards) regcomp() implementations.

Sounds better, i added an entry to the TODO list, see below.

Yours,
  Ingo


Log Message:
-----------
portability: word boundaries in regular expressions

Modified Files:
--------------
    mdocml:
        TODO

Revision Data
-------------
Index: TODO
===================================================================
RCS file: /home/cvs/mdocml/mdocml/TODO,v
retrieving revision 1.203
retrieving revision 1.204
diff -LTODO -LTODO -u -p -r1.203 -r1.204
--- TODO
+++ TODO
@@ -488,6 +488,14 @@ are mere guesses, and some may be wrong.
   loc **  exist **  algo **  size *  imp **
 
 ************************************************************************
+* portability
+************************************************************************
+
+- word boundaries in regular expressions for whatis(1)
+  set up config tests to use [[:<:]], \<, or nothing
+  reminded by Peter Bray Fri, 03 Apr 2015 23:02:16 +1100
+
+************************************************************************
 * warning issues
 ************************************************************************
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