[cocci] pcre vs pcre2

["Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones@redhat.com>]

PCRE (not PCRE2) is end of life: http://www.pcre.org/

and may be removed from Fedora:

  https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/K3BUC6T5VIG7LXOV4RVFO7IUPE2LGA2J/

It seems as if coccinelle has an optional dep on PCRE enabled/disabled
through ./configure --enable-pcre-syntax.  It's not entirely clear to
me what Fedora would lose by disabling this.

Does coccinelle plan to move to PCRE2?

I have moved a few projects over to PCRE2.  It's definitely not an
automatic conversion, although it also wasn't especially difficult.
Here's libguestfs.  This is mostly C and we maintain our own PCRE
bindings for OCaml which are not based on Markus Mottl's bindings, but
it should give you an idea of the changes:

  https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/commit/82493579f38f39769861f31403ccfb8e97b41f96
  https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs-common/commit/0b244f2b0cfc920f2432f5df45e108583f0d2901

We decided not to support alternate PCRE or PCRE2 compiles since all
distros have provided PCRE2 for a long time.

Also:

  https://github.com/mmottl/pcre-ocaml/issues/25

Rich.

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