[cmake-developers] Making your regular expression engine more reliable

[Domen Vrankar]

2017-05-18 21:44 GMT+02:00 Alan W. Irwin <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca>:

> I have just discovered a long-standing regular expression bug (see
> <https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/cmake/issues/16899>) that has been
> around since at least 3.0.2.
>
> So your unit tests for regular expressions obviously missed at least
> this issue. I have no idea what those unit tests are (or even if they
> exist), but one possibility for attempting to wring most of the bugs out
> of your regular expression processor is to adapt some other project's
> regexp test suite. See
> <http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15819919/where-can-i-
> find-unit-tests-for-regular-expressions-in-multiple-languages>
> for a rather large list of such test suites.
>
> Another possibility is simply to forget supporting your own regexp
> engine and adopt someone else's very well regarded regexp engine (such
> as libprng).  I vaguely recall that has been suggested before, but
> since that hasn't happened I presume inertia or NIH syndrome won or
> else there was some strong reason why you didn't go that route.
>

There's a third option that comes to mind - I remember that a while back
there was talk about TR1 becoming a requirement for building CMake so TR1
regex library could be exposed (probably just ECMAScript version).

How far along is the TR1 idea to being implemented/accepted?

Regards,
Domen
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/cmake-developers/attachments/20170518/6d9e26b5/attachment.html>