Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 11:48:10 +0300 (IDT) From: Eli Zaretskii X-Sender: eliz AT is To: Juan Manuel Guerrero cc: JT Williams , djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE: DJGPP port of GNU Sed 3.02.80 uploaded In-Reply-To: <243A027727B@HRZ1.hrz.tu-darmstadt.de> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: djgpp AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk On Tue, 24 Jul 2001, Juan Manuel Guerrero wrote: > 1) I have compiled using the GNU regex implementation included > in the sed sources and not the DJGPP libc regex. GNU regex is > superior to the DJGPP regex. If you inspect the sed302b.zip > package you will find a second sed binary called gsed.exe. > That one is the out-of-the-box compiled sed binary. That sed > program has been compiled with GNU regex and that binary must > be compared with the sed binary from sed3028b.zip. > The sed.exe from sed302b.zip has been created by Eli using > the regex functions from DJGPP 2.03. I'd advise to keep the two executables in the distribution, and to make the binary built with libc's regex the default, named sed.exe. That's because the version of GNU regex which comes with Sed produces an executable that is 2-4 times slower on common jobs. I'm told that this is due to some bug or misfeature in GNU regex, but until it is fixed, I don't think we should punish users. Sed is used heavily in configure scripts, and it doesn't make sense to slow them down by such a large factor. I put gsed.exe into the distribution because the libc's regex takes about forever on some _extremely_ complicated regular expressions, where GNU regex takes a long, but finite time. For example, the venerable dc.sed script, which implements an RPN calculator with Sed commands (!) takes so long with our regex that I was never able to wait long enough for it to finish. Experience shows that the problems in libc's regex routines never surface for the absolute majority of DJGPP users: I've never seen any question here that would require to tell the questor to use gsed.exe. So if someone considers how to make only one executable, I'd recommend to build it with libc's regex, not with GNU regex.