Long-term maintenance of PCRE2

[Philip Hazel]

I am posting this message on [e-mail] and also as an issue on the PCRE2Project on GitHub so that it gets to as many people as possible.

I implemented PCRE in the summer of 1997, never expecting it to be still going strong 27 years later, nor be as widely used as it seems to be. Except for the JIT code that is Zoltan's, the development and maintenance of PCRE has been my own project, though of course many others have offered patches and suggestions over the years.

The time has come to think about my successor. I have recently had a Big Scary Birthday and am unfortunately beginning to feel my age. It would be a good thing if the PCRE2 project could be passed on to others while I am still around to help with the transition.

If anybody has any suggestions as to how best to go about this, please get in touch.

[Conrad Buck]

Thanks for everything you've put into it!

[Addison Crump]

I'll happily contribute to testing code where I am able, esp. automated testing. @carenas has been associated with the project for some time and of course @zherczeg develops the JIT.

Any maintainer who answers this call would have support in these regards.

[Alex Dowad]

@PhilipHazel Thanks very much for providing this fine tool to the world and maintaining it for all these years.

Maintaining PCRE2 sounds fascinating, but a bit intimidating. How do you ensure that each new release works on all supported platforms? For example, I see in the source tree that there is a port to OpenVMS. Do you have a test machine running OpenVMS?

[Philip Hazel]

The short answer is that I cannot test everything. The OpenVMS stuff comes from a contributor who sends updates from time to time. Likewise the Zig and Bazel support files. All I have is a 64-bit Arch Linux system - I can no longer test on a 32-bit machine - hence the recent SNAFU with the tests on 32-bits. GitHub actions are used to run automated tests in some other environments and the builds for the oss-fuzz tests sometimes pick up issues. I used to put out a Release Candidate for each release but found that not many people tested them. On the whole, if PCRE" builds, it will work because the main library is pure C code. I have had a couple of other people express interest in taking on the maintenance; I'm leaving it a few more days before proceeding. Would you like to be involved in the discussions?

[MatthewVernon]

I'd just like to say thank you for all your work on pcre (and, indeed, Exim)!
As the current Debian maintainer for PCRE, I'd be interested in discussions about PCRE's future, although I think I am not the right person to be "upstream" as Debian puts it.

[Alex Dowad]

Would you like to be involved in the discussions?

Dear @PhilipHazel, certainly, I am interested. 😄 My privmail address is in my GitHub profile.

[Philip Hazel]

@MatthewVernon , please can you let me have an email address to add to my (private) list of interested parties. I'm planning to start a discussion by email in a few days' time.

[MatthewVernon]

@PhilipHazel sure - best to use matthew at debian dot org

[Neustradamus]

@PhilipHazel: Good job since this long time and for @Exim project too.

Do not forget to add the new team here:

• https://sourceforge.net/projects/pcre/

And to send access to the website...

Linked to:

• #154
• #385
• #386
• #387

[Philip Hazel]

I am not responsible for the sourceforge site, nor pcre.org. The webmaster has not been responding for quite a long time now.

[Lukas Javorsky]

Hi Philip, sorry for the late reply, I assume the conversation with the interested parties has already begun (or maybe already finished).

Would it be possible to add me to the thread, so I (as the maintainer of pcre2 for Fedora/RHEL/CentOS Stream) can have the information about the future steps and plans of this project?

My email address is in my GitHub profile.

Thank you so much again for all the work you've put into this ❤️

[Philip Hazel]

Hi Lukas, the conversation with interested parties has very much died down, but there's been a flurry of work happening in PCRE2 as you will see if you look at the Git log and/or GitHub issues and pull requests. Just in case another email conversation happens, I have added you to my list of interested parties, but there are no active email threads at the moment.

[Zoltan Herczeg]

As far as I know there is no sponsored maintenance behind pcre2, and it does not seem to change. We do what we can in our free time, but there are other priorities (job, family) in our life, so there is no guarantee when we respond to a problem. There are times, when we are quite active, and there are times when we are kind of non-existent. But it is unlikely we abandon the project since we have already spent a lot of effort on it. This also means there are no fixed plans for the future. People focus on areas they like.

[Carlo Marcelo Arenas Belón]

One thing we know for sure about the future, is that we are going to release 10.45 and we are hoping for it to be the best version of PCRE yet, so as soon as we get the first RC of it, it would be really helpful if it would be picked up and tested as widely as possible (ex: as part of Fedora Rawhide, Debian Testing or similar options).

[shenleban tongying]

the conversation with interested parties has very much died down,

Maybe this issue should be pinned so that anyone visiting the "Issues" tab will see it. “Pin issue” button is on the right sidebar.

https://docs.github.com/en/issues/tracking-your-work-with-issues/pinning-an-issue-to-your-repository

[Philip Hazel]

Good idea. Pinned.