Re: Gnulib's regex.c appears to ignore RE_ICASE

[James Youngman]

On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 03:33:57PM +0100, James Youngman wrote:

(Crossposted to bug-findutils - for those just tuning in, it looks
like the "-iregex" test in GNU find is not actually case insensitive
on non-GNU systems, and it looks like this is a bug in findutils which
has existed for some time).

> The RE_ICASE flag appears to work with glibc's implementation of
> re_match().  My system is using libc6 from Debian (2.3.2.ds1-22).

I've now downloaded and unpacked the glibc source.  Its re_match()
implementation is the one by Isamu Hasegawa.  This means that I can't
just fix this problem 'locally' via a simple patch to the copy of
regex.c that ships with findutils.

I think for the moment the best plan is to disable case-insensitive
regular expression support in find on systems that would otherwise
need to use the gnulib version.  

The "locate" program can continue to use regexec(), which has working
REG_ICASE support.  My plan is to have "find -regex" and "locate
--regex" understand the same variety of regular expressions, but that
can wait for a while.

In the longer term, assume I have some time but only limited
understanding of DFAs and no useful experience of anything subtle to
do with regex matching.  Is there nevertheless something useful I
could do to help with this?

Regards,
James.