our own, tiny regex support?

[Bernhard Fischer]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 08:24:26AM -0400, Poly-poly man wrote:
>On Monday 14 July 2008 03:57:28 am you wrote:
>> On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 05:59:58PM -0400, Poly-p man wrote:
>> >uclibc's regexp code is 53k by itself.
>>
>> There are 2 regexp in uClibc, which one are you talking about?
>
>not sure - the config option for regex just says it's 53k by itself. I think 
>that might be the older one...
>
>> >Since things like expr, awk, etc. need it, I was wondering if it was
>> >even feasible to consider writing our own miniature,
>> >just-what-we-need-and-no-more regexp code, possibly implementing that as
>> >an option or whatever.
>> >
>> >I could do some work on this, but I'd like some input from the mailing
>> >list first.
>>
>> I don't think this makes sense, improve uClibc instead, i'd say.
>
>It would be nice to improve uClibc, but I think about it this way - uClibc 
>needs a full implementation of regex. Busybox needs only what it needs 
>(unless I'm missing something...)
>
>53k is a lot...

Needless duplication doesn't make sense to me. There is no benefit in
having 2 separate regex impls, one for the whole system and a crippled
one just for busybox.

If you will only ever have busybox as the only regex-user in your image,
then you should have stripped any non-referenced funcs off your final
image anyway. Voilà no need to have duplicate impls in the first place.