Hi Robert, apparently the pcre library (named pcre3 in Debian) is obsolete and it is recommended to switch to pcre2. See the Debian bug report below.
"Bookworm" is the next Debian release, which is planned for 2023. "In time for the release of Bookworm" would probably mean a removal from the development version of Debian in 2022. As Ubuntu and probably other Debian derivatives base themselves on Debian's development version, this might affect those distributions earlier than 2023. Regards Carsten Matthew Vernon <matt...@debian.org> writes: > Source: pound > Severity: important > User: matthew-pcre...@debian.org > Usertags: obsolete-pcre3 > > Dear maintainer, > > Your package still depends on the old, obsolete PCRE3[0] libraries > (i.e. libpcre3-dev). This has been end of life for a while now, and > upstream do not intend to fix any further bugs in it. Accordingly, I > would like to remove the pcre3 libraries from Debian, preferably in > time for the release of Bookworm. > > The newer PCRE2 library was first released in 2015, and has been in > Debian since stretch. Upstream's documentation for PCRE2 is available > here: https://pcre.org/current/doc/html/ > > Many large projects that use PCRE have made the switch now (e.g. git, > php); it does involve some work, but we are now at the stage where > PCRE3 should not be used, particularly if it might ever be exposed to > untrusted input. > > This mass bug filing was discussed on debian-devel@ in > https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2021/11/msg00176.html > > Regards, > > Matthew [0] Historical reasons mean that old PCRE is packaged as > pcre3 in Debian
