[Bug gdb/27681] FAIL: gdb.base/help.exp: apropos \(print[^[ bsiedf\".-]\) (timeout)

["tromey at sourceware dot org" <sourceware-bugzilla@sourceware.org>]

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=27681

--- Comment #19 from Tom Tromey <tromey at sourceware dot org> ---
(In reply to Michael Matz from comment #18)
> The types are simply incompatible:
> [...]

This has existed for a very long time in gdb.
compiled_regex (commit 2d7cc5c797) didn't even introduce it,
it existed in apropos_command + apropos_cmd before that.

I suspect the answer is that gdb was originally written
to assume the libiberty regex implementation.
xregex.h redefines the various symbols and then xregex2.h says:

   typedef struct re_pattern_buffer regex_t;

I suppose the bug then is from this code in gdb_regex.h:

#ifdef USE_INCLUDED_REGEX
# include "xregex.h"
#else

commit 8898755195db
Date:   Tue Apr 4 02:08:52 2000 +0000

So still pretty darn old.

I wonder whether we should just switch this back off and rely
on libiberty.  The main benefit here would be that we have some
code that would be improved if it could use a regex that didn't
rely on a \0-terminated buffer, namely the output functions
that strip or apply styles.  Currently these have to allocate
sometimes to ensure their input is correctly terminated.
Anyway, I think the GNU implementations already handle this,
for their Emacs support.

OTOH maybe that's niche and we should just fix the bug directly.
I didn't research to see why that patch was written in the first place.

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