[Toybox] grep and empty regexes

[Rob Landley]

On 7/28/19 7:59 PM, Ed Maste wrote:
> On Mon, 29 Jul 2019 at 07:19, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>>
>> Your timing is impeccable. Guess what the gmail spurious delivery failure due to
>> spam false positive du jour was? (Other than me. I get unsubscribed to my own
>> list and have to send a "confirm" email twice a week. Yes, I need to move off
>> gmail, but I'm kinda busy...)
> 
> You and me both :(

The other _fun_ part is for the past few weeks it's been giving me these popups
(screenshot attached) and every time it does the "downloading message 137/408"
transaction aborts with an error and gmail _deletes_ the rest of those messages
off the server. (I.E. the couple hundred it didn't download: gone.)

I'm trying to work around it by disconnecting from the network before dismissing
the popup, and seeing if _that_ variant of abort doesn't  delete them? (I've
watched it delete them via the web interface, but can't watch via the web
interface when I umplug from the net without a second machine...)

> One caveat, on FreeBSD by default we still have:
> 
> % grep --version
> grep (GNU grep) 2.5.1-FreeBSD
> 
> Replacing it with BSD grep is in progress, and it's still under
> somewhat active development. There's also a WITH_GNU_GREP_COMPAT
> build-time option that links against libgnuregex. So there are lots of
> ways the BSD libc regcomp won't be used in whatever is installed as
> /usr/bin/grep.

None of this is gnu, it's Linux. The Linux development community has just been
sending patches to grep's "upstream" for years because that's what you do, but
most aren't members of the religion. (Ulrich Drepper was quite vocal that his
glibc fork had nothing to do with the gnu project, see the "And now for some not
so nice things" P.S. at the end of
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/libc-announce/2001/msg00000.html . Yeah yeah,
sharks vs lawyers, who do you root for. I should collect a proper writeup of the
EGCS fork that's easy to point to...)

That said, if the Linux behavior is what even BSD has been using for years, then
that's what we need to implement. There IS a standard, it's just not properly
documented and because the standards bodies are asleep at the switch. (LSB got
sucked into the Linux Foundation's ravenous maw, Posix won't be interesting
again until Jorg Schilling dies... Once upon a time "the de-facto standard" was
whatever chunks of BSD and System V behavior things like coherent or xenix
needed to implement to keep the userbase happy. Linux has a bunch of Sun
heritage because Linus implemented his intial system call set from his
university library copy of their printed manuals, and it has a bunch of minix
heritage because it was implemented under that and inherited most of its
developer base. Long ago we had the "all the world's a VAX" stage. The existence
of de-facto standards is nothing new.

I'd _like_ to get Android to the point where it _becomes_ a new de facto
standard, in that it's the development environment of choice* and what it does
is what most people do, but it's not there yet and it's one of those "nobody
will believe it's worth doing until it happens, then it's retroactively
inevitable and of course everybody always knew it would happen". Sigh...

Rob

* Because Android's got like 3 billion seats already. It's the _deployed_
environment of choice, and if it _can_ be a development environment then its
users can be developers. Apple's goal of a read-only future with a giant captive
audience paying to passively consume content forever (and what content creation
happens requires up-front payment to apple, an ongoing royalty payment to apple,
and apple's approval for it to ever be distributed) is disgusting. Android can
counter that by being capable of authoring content out of the box, up to and
including rebuilding and improving the OS itself as a bog standard capability of
each instance of the thing. If we can't get a fully open environment universally
deployed, we can open the one we've _got_ as much as we can, and give it as many
content creation capabilities as we can. I can't make that happen myself, but I
can reduce the gap between reality and where I want to be.
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