From: Giles D Malet (gdm@shrdlu.kwnet.on.ca)
Date: 01/04/93


From: gdm@shrdlu.kwnet.on.ca (Giles D Malet)
Subject: Re: libc.so.4.2 Caveats!
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 04:30:03 GMT

In article <MNL.93Jan2002919@mnlsun.dtro.e-technik.th-darmstadt.de>
        mnl@dtro.e-technik.th-darmstadt.de (Michael N. Lipp) writes:
>
>2) sed doesn't work any more. I have recompiled it using FSF sed-1.13.tar.Z.
> Strange enough, although I removed the sed-local regex.o getop.o and
> getopt1.o (thus using the functions in libc.so.4.2) and compiled with
> -O2, my new sed is about twice as large as the old one. Was it not
> FSF sed-1.13 in the SLS distribution?

You have already been told how to reduce the program size (-N).

I grabbed the SLS sed a couple of weeks ago and found problems
with it. It is (was) version 1.09, and the problems turned out to be
in libc.so.4.2. If you look in <regex.h> you will see a flag called
RE_NO_BK_PARENS, and it appears the state of this flag has been toggled
between 4.1 and 4.2. This causes sed to fail, as a `group' is now
defined by (...) rather than \(...\).

H.J.Lu appears to indicate this is a change in the original library, not
just the Linux version. Somewhat stupid, that. Now you have to compile
sed (and I presume other programs too) with their included regex code.

So what are libraries for, anyway ?

-- 
Giles D Malet                                             gdm@shrdlu.kwnet.on.ca
Waterloo, Ont, Canada       +1 519 725 5726       gdmalet@descartes.uwaterloo.ca