david reid wrote: > > Allowing those using apr-util to benefit from having builtin regex > support is a good thing. Asking them to include yet another library is a > bad thing.
Just be aware this is a mixed bag. It won't harm httpd's use, since as you point out it's already required. But note that it's baggage aprutil will have to carry. We already have too many interdependencies that make building aprutil binaries for portability near-impossible. No - don't insert the word 'win32' in the paragraph above, I'm talking about good old solaris/linux/bsd etc etc etc binaries. Someone shipping a binary can either 1. rely on every subdependency in the world, which is alot of weight to carry or preinstallation to demand, or 2. deploy the minimum subset required for that application. > Asking people to learn the intracies of libpcre (not as simple as they > seem as I discovered) to simply use a regex pattern in their code is a > bad thing. I agree that pcre is a non trivial problem, so I'm +1 from a usability perspective. Name a 'language' that doesn't provide this. But once you cross the threshold from simple matching to intricate substitutions, I'm not certain that 'simple' bindings are effective. > Most of the above seemed to be self evident, so the high level of > resistance I saw to my proposal surprised me. I think part of the feature-creep paranoia is that aprutil's bindings just aren't scaling very well. We need to revisit the modularity of all these library dependencies sooner, rather than later, and the resistance to the proposal illustrates this well, as does my earlier objection to memcached support. If aprutil provides some finer granularity, I'd expect much less resistance to new bindings. > The fact that people were happy to complain on IRC but not post to the > list worried me. That's become a troubling pattern, but in all fairness, it's not a bad place to brainstorm. It is a bad place to raise and discuss objections, because you return to the list to discover that other folks also have the same objection and needlessly repeat yourself. Plus, future devs don't gain the benefit of "why was this done thusly?" dialog in archives. > Why did I withdraw my patch from discussion? The level of resistance I > saw was quite high and given how many things I'm working on and the fact > that the regex support isn't high on any list of things to be done, I > decided to cut it from my todo list - freeing my time up for other > things. I'd rather be doing productive things than debating pro's and > cons of something that people don't want. Understandable; if folks are interested in this being added please pick up the baton from David and continue the dialog of adding this code.
