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Re: Who is the procmail maintainer? (revisited 2005)

2005-11-05 12:07:52
On 11/4/05, Google Kreme <gkreme(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
On 03 Nov 2005, at 17:41 , Bart Schaefer wrote:
Also keep in mind that the procmail rules for "greediness" of
expressions are different, and its expression engine has other
behavior that is tuned for stream-processing of email.  It's far more
complex than just a matter of dropping in a different third-party
regex package.

:0
* Old style rules

PCRE=YES
:0
* PCRE rules

You're missing the point.  Procmail's greediness etc. are different
for a reason:  In most cases procmail rules are merely testing for
*any* match of the regular expression, not for the "canonical" match. 
Replacing procmail semantics with PCRE semantics (not just PCRE
syntax) could significantly reduce its efficiency as a stream scanner.

Assuming someone could be found who was willing to rewrite procmail's
engine essentially from the ground up, it'd still be necessary for the
legacy behavior to be the default

or it could be a compile time option, where you could make new regex
rules the default and have flags to enable the old method.

No, that won't fly.  Too many users are not in control of the procmail
installation that parses their carefully crafted rc files.  I'm
opposed to the idea of providing sysadmins with yet another way to
accidentally mess up their users' personal configurations.


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