[Development] 16-bit PCRE landed in upstream master

[Robin Burchell]

On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 2:40 PM, Giuseppe D'Angelo <dangelog at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2011/12/30 Stephen Kelly <stephen.kelly at kdab.com>:
>> This is due for release in mid-January, so Qt 5.0 could depend on the 16 bit
>> API already.
>
> I'd like to bring the discussion we had on IRC yesterday on the
> mailing list. What are the people's opinions about whether it's "good"
> (for any value of good) for Qt 5.0 to depend on the 16 bit PCRE?

Reiterating my views from that discussion...

This feature in PCRE is bleeding edge.
Qt 5 is also bleeding edge.

In my opinion, it is ok to depend on it, as for Qt-in-distro targets,
we expect that PCRE will most likely release, and be available, long
before Qt 5 will be, so the case of Qt 5 by default in distros will
happen after PCRE is already available. This is not the case for LTS
releases, etc, and never will be, because they don't like to bump
versions. On the other hand, Qt 5 won't be available there as a
default either, for similar reasons.

As we'll be bundling a copy of PCRE somehow anyway (for platforms
where it is not provided), it should be easy enough to fallback to the
bundled copy should the system copy not be sufficient. The costs (for
us) are low, the costs for users of old distros are small - an
additional library on disk and in-memory for Qt 5 using apps, and it
means less code (and more optimal code) in Qt itself.

I'd say it's worth it.