Re: please consider using PCRE_DOLLAR_ENDONLY (and PCRE_DOTALL) for rematchpcre

[Phil Pennock <zsh-workers+phil.pennock@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2018-01-19 at 23:48 -0800, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> Another one that seems to have lost traction. Holiday malaise?
> (workers/42044)

Speaking only for myself: the =~ for PCRE is a thin wrapper around the
long-standing PCRE module (introduced in 2001) and that in turn is a
thin wrapper around the PCRE defaults.

Changing the default behavior of valid semantics risks hard-to-debug
breakage of existing scripts and I am erring on the side of being
against this change.  It's not hard opposition, but I'd like to see
stronger justification before risking breaking changes.

I know that I myself have scripts which rely upon PCRE matching against
multiline data behaving as per the defaults of pcrepattern(3).

In addition, while the DOTALL change can be turned off in-regex, the
dollar-endonly one can't, AFAIK, so that becomes a breaking change which
can't be worked around.

-Phil