Bug#982310: libglib2.0-dev: Depends directly on libpcre3-dev (old) and indirectly on libpcre2-dev (new)

[Simon McVittie]

Control: severity -1 wishlist
Control: tags -1 + upstream wontfix
Control: forwarded -1 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/1085

On Mon, 08 Feb 2021 at 16:53:41 +0100, Diederik de Haas wrote:
> I just did an "apt-get build-dep linux" and noticed that both old
> (pcre3) as new (pcre2) PCRE libs got installed.
> Quering aptitude as to why, pointed both towards libglib2.0-dev.
> That seems silly/weird to me, hence this bug report.

Unfortunately, GLib's GRegex API (which is considered to be deprecated)
is implemented in terms of PCRE 8.x (pcre3).

See also <https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/642>,
<https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/962>,
<https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/1085>.

If this is ever solved, it will have to be solved upstream. Fixing this
in a Debian-specific way is not something that can usefully happen.

According to
<https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/1451>,
GRegex "cannot be moved to PCRE2 without breaking its API contract",
so it might not be possible to solve this upstream either.

    smcv