Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Using the PCRE library for Windows??
From: Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2011 17:18:22 -0700
On 6/22/11 4:31 PM, Alex Lindberg wrote:
> True, but since pcre is removed from the windows library download site,
> should the PCRE option still be in the config.nmake file?

No. As it stands, the PCRE content in config.nmake and Makefile.nmake
add unnecessary clutter.

> In epan/ftypes/*c files, both the pcre lib and Gtkregex are  used
> causing the developer to take both into account.  IMHO, ugly.

Would it be better to deprive users of functionality so the code can be
pretty?

> In my case, I use the regcomp set of functions to build a library of
> regex expressions to parse my data sets.  If the pcre lib is available
> for Linux, why not for windows. I would request that the pcre libs/bin
> file be restored to the 1.4 and 1.6 (trunk) resources.

You're assuming that there's a version of PCRE available to restore.
This isn't the case on 64-bit Windows, which is what prompted the move
to GRegex in the first place. GRegex lets us have more uniform feature
parity across the different platforms we support and removes a
dependency on an external library. However, it isn't available in older
versions of GLib so the pre-existing PCRE code has been left in place.

At some point we'll probably abandon PCRE entirely in favor of GRegex,
particularly if we require 2.14 or later.