standards/54410: one-true-awk not POSIX compliant (no extended REs)

[David Schultz]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2004, Jens Schweikhardt wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 01:36:35AM +0400, Andrey Chernov wrote:
> # On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 11:19:12PM +0200, Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav wrote:
> # > > Jens, I came up with this patch a while ago and sent it to Andrey in
> # > > private mail:
> # > > 	http://people.freebsd.org/~tjr/awk-re.diff
> # > 
> # > that is never going to fly...  the patch is too intrusive, it will
> # > make future upgrades a nightmare.
> # 
> # I try this patch and it works in simple tests, but I very doubt awk's 
> # author will accept it. 
> 
> This is no longer a matter of doubt. See my mail to bwk and his reply,
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=standards/54410
> 
> So the current options seem to be
> 1. patch 1Tawk to use the regex lib
> 2. ditch 1Tawk and use GNU awk
> 3. keep 1Tawk and tell people in posix(7) to use GAWK for better ERE support
> 4. do nothing
> 5. <your idea here>

(1) seems like the best option.  The argument about
unmaintainability doesn't hold water given that the author has
*specifically* said that he doesn't even want to touch the part of
the code we would have patches against.  Of course, if bwk changes
his mind about touching the awk regex code, then we're in even better
shape because we wouldn't have to maintain the patches anymore!