From: Dennis Newbold <dennisn@...>
Date: 2002-06-11T02:28:28+09:00
Subject: Alternate Regular Expressions Library

A few weeks ago on the mailing list there was a small thread discussing
the fact that using Ruby for certain types of projects is made more
difficult due to the licensing restrictions of the LGPL which are
associated with the use of the regular expressions library.  I recently
ran into a website which provides a Perl5 compatible regular expressions
library (www.pcre.org) with a much less restrictive license
(www.pcre.org/license.txt).  Provided of course, that it tests out OK,
I'd like to suggest to the active Ruby developers, that this library be
used in the next major Ruby release instead of the current GNU library.
Alternatively, perhaps the Makefile could be configured in such a way
that a person building Ruby from the sources could easily select to build
and link with either the GNU or the PCRE regular expression library,
depending on his needs.  Thanks.

Dennis

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