Re: grep: fix multibyte regex handling under macOS (1819ad327b7a1f19540a819813b70a0e8a7f798f)

From: D. Ben Knoble <ben.knoble@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 5, 2023, 19:51 UTC
Message-ID: <CALnO6CC2w5LUAjXVw7CWKAVobjFMc7M7jm7HuuGT1SO0q5cYbA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CANgJU+UJ-p54MDmQWYTEsdh_ss-q8TUEcqHFm568Lpfsy2dU+w@mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, Feb 4, 2023 at 6:32 AM demerphq <demerphq@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> I think that if you look at other broadly ported projects there is
> evidence that owning your own dependencies makes a project easier and
> cheaper to port to new platforms. […] No doubt there
> are many other long running projects with precedents in this area.
> What does Vi or Vim do? What does Emacs do? Etc.

Vi and Vim have their own pattern language descended from Ed. They thus have their own implementation for it. (Vim's has at least two different "engines" powering the same syntax, and tries to automatically pick the best one in case; I'm not sure if Vim compiles the patterns before using them.) The advantage is that, as has been pointed out, you can rely on Vi or Vim patterns.

…

Any thoughts on some sort of stop-gap measure to fix --word-diff while Git decides how to handle the regex engine incompatibilities? How important is the sequence of bytes at the end of --word-diff regexes in userdiff.c?

-- 
D. Ben Knoble