Subject: [alpine-devel] Regex compatibility

From: Michael Fox <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2015 16:53:48 -0700

Building software on alpine, I notice most problems stem from regex
incompatibility. Is there some way achieve compatibility?

This is especially hard on `make check` because many tests involve regexes.
To the point that I think a lot of packagers are just not running `make
check` because they figure the tests are failing because of test code and
not the code under test. This may be true most of the time but it is
allowing some bugs to slip through.

-- 

-
Michael

---

From: Jeff Pohlmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2015 08:05:02 -0500

> This is especially hard on `make check` because many tests involve regexes.

If it's a matter of the tests actually depending on regex library
calls, I would say
that's something that would probably need to be fixed in the test, since not all
C libraries are going to have the same implementation. But if the tests are
depending on the behavior of the "grep" command, the fix might be as simple
as ensuring that the test environment has GNU grep installed in the path ahead
of busybox grep. (since GUN grep uses PCRE rather than MUSL for its regex.)

- Jeff

---
Unsubscribe:  [email-masked]
Help:         [email-masked]
---

---

From: Natanael Copa <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2015 16:25:42 +0200

On Mon, 29 Jun 2015 16:53:48 -0700

> incompatibility. Is there some way achieve compatibility?

yes. use portable regexes and avoid gnu (and other platform) extensions.

> allowing some bugs to slip through.

buts in 'make check' scripts is likely slippering though yes.

I suppose other option is to install gnu sed and gnu grep when doing
make check. But for longterm, I'd prefer upstream project think more
about portability.

-nc

---

---

From: Michael Fox <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2015 10:11:59 -0700

Here's all the things I've installed to get tests to pass:

gnugrep binutils diffutils coreutils linux-headers gzip bash

And still, of the many basic, core packages I've tested, very few pass all
tests. Maybe less than one in four.

There's currently 7575 packages in alpine. How much work is that to report
failing tests upstream? Even more work to try and make your own patches.

Do you think we can get 200 people to take on a package each day for a
month? If so, I volunteer to be one of them.

-- 

-
Michael

---

From: Michael Fox <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2015 11:12:17 -0700

On second thought, `apk search '*'` spits out a bunch of repeats for some
reason. Then there's dev and doc packages. There's only 3364 unique
packages.

-- 

-
Michael