Official request: Please make GNU grep the default

Roman Divacky rdivacky at FreeBSD.org
Fri Aug 13 09:08:33 UTC 2010


On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 01:43:16AM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
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> Gabor,
> 
> I hope at this point it goes without saying that I have a lot of respect
> for the work you've done on BSD grep, and I've already told you that I
> think you're very courageous for taking the project on. I've been
> testing and evaluating it for some time now, and I think I've given it a
> fair trial. You've done a fairly good job of responding to bug reports,
> and I understand that the exposure BSD grep has received as the default
> in HEAD has been very valuable in exposing additional areas that need
> work. However, with all that in mind I am officially asking you to
> please change the default in HEAD to GNU grep. (Note, I am _not_ asking
> you to remove BSD grep from the tree, just to change the default.)
> 
> My reason is simple, performance. While doing some portmaster work
> recently I was regression testing some changes I made to the --index*
> options and noticed that things were dramatically slower than the last
> time I tested those features. Thinking that I had made a programming
> mistake I dug into my code, and while the regexps that I was using could
> be tuned for slightly better performance the problem was not in my code.
> I then installed textproc/gnugrep to compare, and the differences were
> very dramatic using a highly pessimized test case (finding a match on
> the last line of INDEX). The script I used to test is at
> http://people.freebsd.org/~dougb/grep-time-trial.sh.txt and a typical
> result was:
> 
> GNU grep
> Elapsed time: 2 seconds
> 
> BSD grep
> Elapsed time: 47 seconds

what about optimizing BSD grep instead?


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