On Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:44:24 +0000, Ximin wrote:
Hi,
I had a short look at your examples but to be honest for me this is just not that important. I surely can find more corner cases where the one or the other regexp/special character combination won't work. Either you write a patch to make things better or you maybe just use tools which are more specialised for such tasks like grep, sed and friends.
Take it or leave it, it's your software. regexp by these days is pretty much a standard and there are certain expectations people have when an engine claims to "support regexp". It's irrelevant to say "oh well I don't think these standards matter" because people will get tripped up.
Ok. Then take what I said as my personal point of view and so also the little motivation I personally have to work on this.
If you expect everyone to "write a patch", there's no point for bug-reporting systems. Not everyone has the time to go looking through the source code.
This includes me as well. One of the main ideas of open source is that everybody who wants can contribute and make changes to the code as he/she wishes. I don't expect anyone to do anything but I also can't implement anything anyone wishes. My time is limited as well as yours, probably.
Geany uses the regexp implementation of Scintilla, the used editing component. It's not as good as it could be but it does the job and it doesn't pull in new, external dependencies like libpcre. Please read the documentation to learn more about the use of regular expressions within Find and Replace dialogs in Geany. There are some limitations and differences but generally it just works.
Well excuse me for not looking through the source code before I filed the bug. I will forward this onto Scintilla, then. Also (as I said before), regexp is a *standard* - people should not HAVE to look through documentation to find out the exact quirks of a particular implementation.
I agree but still, there is a difference between what would be nice to have and what reality is...:(.
BTW libpcre is really not a problem for *NIX - most systems will have some important component that depends on it anyway. And for windows/mac you can just static-link it.
It's still another dependency. The goal is to use as less external libaries as possible. Btw, we already use the regexp implementation of the C runtime environment (if available) and use the GNU regexp implementation on all other systems (included in Geany's sources). So, if this would be enough, we would not need an external dependency.
Regards, Enrico