Bug#1000082: glib2.0: depends on obsolete pcre3 library

[Simon McVittie]

On Thu, 18 Nov 2021 at 11:49:04 +0000, Matthew Vernon wrote:
> Your package still depends on the old, obsolete PCRE3[0] libraries
> (i.e. libpcre3-dev).

As I'm sure you're already aware, in the case of GLib this is something
that needs to be resolved upstream, and is not appropriate to change as
a Debian patch.

GLib's GRegex objects are a relatively thin wrapper around PCRE (the old
version) and there have been concerns in the past that it might not be
possible to move from old-PCRE to pcre2 without incompatible behaviour
changes.

The upstream discussion is on
<https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/1085>. I think this is
"tags + help" from an upstream perspective, but "tags + wontfix" downstream.

Christian Persch has apparently done a proof-of-concept port to PCRE2, but
has not shared the result in any obvious way, so the next step would be for
someone to either persuade Christian to share the resulting branch, or
reimplement it.

    smcv