Re: t7810.94 (git-grep -E -F -G) never passed

On May 25, 2011, at 6:21 AM, Michael J Gruber wrote:

"Never" is a strong statement when this test always passed for everyone
else running tests, assuming they would have reported otherwise. What's
your system?

My apologies.  It was late and I wasn't explicit enough.  What I meant was:

"This test has failed on my system ever since the commit that introduced it."

My system is running OS X 10.6.7.

reg-ex.info says:

"The other BRE metacharacters require a backslash to give them their
special meaning."

"Some implementations support \? and \+... but \? and \+ are not part of
the POSIX standard."

So I guess we're going with "some".

Some would be right.  I tend to find that the BSD (and BSD-like) libraries on OS X are more strict and have less features than the GNU equivalents.  (The fact that OS X's libreadline is actually the only mostly compatible libedit drives me batty sometimes.)

This does leave us with the question of what to do with the test.  Perhaps a pattern like "a*+b" to match "aa+b"?  Plain + should always match just + in a BRE, even if \+ is special, and the * makes sure that it is a regex instead of plain string matching.

~~ Brian