On November 21, 2021 10:50:24 PM UTC, Wietse Venema <wie...@porcupine.org>
wrote:
>Wietse Venema:
>> Scott Kitterman:
>> > The original PCRE library that Postfix uses is no longer maintained:
>> >
>> > https://pcre.org/
>> >
>> > It's been replaced by PCRE2, which has a notably different API, so Postfix
>> > PCRE
>> > support would need porting. I've looked and it's beyond my limited
>> > skills.
>> > Is there any chance of getting this updated for Postfix 3.7?
>> >
>> > PCRE2 was released 6 years ago, so I would imagine support is reasonably
>> > widespread.
>>
>> Thanks for the reminder. Now is the time to start planning
>> the annual stable release.
>
>I have an implementation based on PCRE2 that passes the existing
>Postfix tests for PCRE (which are ASCII based), without triggering
>complaints from Valgrind. I'll release this code first in Postfix
>3.7. After that we can discuss if it makes sense to merge this
>change back into earlier stable Postfix versions.
>
>One visible difference is that the obscure 'X' pattern flag is no
>longer supported, because the underlying PCRE_EXTRA feature no
>longer exists in the PCRE2 library. Postfix ignores the flag and
>logs a warning.
>
>There may be other visible differences in the way that the PCRE2
>library handles malformed UTF8, or content that happens to be using
>a different 8-bit encoding.
>
>I updated the PCRE auto-detection code in the makedefs script. It
>will try to use PCRE2, and if that is not installed, it will try
>to use PCRE. If we merge this back into earlier stable Postfix
>versions, then maybe PCRE should be the default, because breaking
>changes in a stable release are unwelcome.
>
> Wietse
Great news, thanks. For Debian's purposes we won't need support for PCRE2
before 3.7. I don't know about anyone else.
Scott K
