Re: [PATCH] regex: Add extra escapes to regular expressions in m4

[Eric Blake]

On 1/29/19 12:57 PM, Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote:
> From: Siddhesh Poyarekar <address@hidden>
> 
>       * m4/regex.m4 (gl_REGEX): Add extra escape characters to
>       regular expressions.
> ---
> 
> The m4 preprocessor eats up half the escape characters, so give it twice
> as much.  I ran into this when running tests for glibc 2.29 release and
> verified that this patch fixes the problem.

Which versions of m4 and autoconf are you seeing this under? Can you
show actual snippets from the generated configure file showing that \
was eaten?  And why are you only touching some of the lines, rather than
all places where \\ appears in the regex.m4 file?  This fix feels fishy,
and I seriously doubt that escape characters are being eaten by m4, but
I would like to make sure we have a real root cause understanding what
prompted this patch.

> +++ b/m4/regex.m4
> @@ -204,7 +204,7 @@ AC_DEFUN([gl_REGEX],
>                             & ~RE_CONTEXT_INVALID_DUP
>                             & ~RE_NO_EMPTY_RANGES);
>              memset (&regex, 0, sizeof regex);
> -            s = re_compile_pattern ("[[:alnum:]_-]\\\\+$", 16, &regex);
> +            s = re_compile_pattern ("[[:alnum:]_-]\\\\\\\\+$", 16, &regex);
>              if (s)
>                result |= 32;

For example, if I take coreutils.git, and using the Fedora 29 pre-built
m4-1.4.18-9.fc29.x86_64 and autoconf-2.69-28.fc29.noarch, I see the
following in the resulting configure (without your patch applied):

$ grep -A2 're_compile.*alnum' gnulib/m4/regex.m4 configure
gnulib/m4/regex.m4:            s = re_compile_pattern
("[[:alnum:]_-]\\\\+$", 16, &regex);
gnulib/m4/regex.m4-            if (s)
gnulib/m4/regex.m4-              result |= 32;
--
configure:            s = re_compile_pattern ("[[:alnum:]_-]\\\\+$", 16,
&regex);
configure-            if (s)
configure-              result |= 32;

which is identical (no \ eaten), so I'm not sure why you are seeing
problems.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3226
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org

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