libc regex word-boundary support fallen-off?

[RW]

I've noticed for some time that claws-mail and less (which I think use
libc's regex(3)) don't support word boundaries in searches. I might be
delusional, but I think I've used \b in the past in both of those
applications in FreeBSD.  

According to regex(3) it's an implementation POSIX.2, so the feature
needn't be supported, but at the bottom of the page it says
"word-boundary matching is a bit of a kludge", so presumably it has
been.

Does anyone know what's going on?


I switched from i386 to amd64 last year so it might be something to do
with that. I'm currently using 8.2p6.