migration to libpcre2 ?

[Jean Baptiste Favre <we...@jbfavre.org>]

Hello team,
Is there any plan to migrate from pcre3 to pcre2 ?
I made a quick and unsuccessful attempt of drop-replace in build/pcre.m4
My guess is that the change will be more invasive than simply swipping 
libraries. I'd be glad to help if possible.

Best,
Jean Baptiste Favre

Please find below the message from libpcre3 Debian maintainer[0]

TL;DR> pcre3 is obsolete and upstream don't want to fix it any more. I 
propose a MBF to track our progress in getting rid of it for Bookworm

PCRE is the perl-compatible regular expression library, 
https://pcre.org/ For historical reasons, the old PCRE library ended up 
as libpcre3 in Debian. I'm going to call it pcre3 hereafter.

In 2015, PCRE upstream brought out pcre2, re-architectured to be be more 
secure and easier to maintain (it's been in Debian since stretch). Many 
large (and small) projects have successfully migrated to pcre2.

PCRE upstream have been increasingly reluctant to fix bugs in pcre3, and 
have said that they intent to make no further releases of it. So I think 
it's high time we got it out of Debian, particularly given it's often 
used to handle untrusted input.

I propose, therefore, a MBF against the remaining 218 packages in Debian 
that Build-Depend upon pcre3 (except where that's an alternative to 
pcre2). I suggest important for now, but with a view to hopefully making 
this RC for bookworm.

I'm aware that some upstreams are looking at the pcre2 migration (e.g. 
glib2); hopefully we can encourage them to get that work done sooner 
rather than later :)

[0]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2021/11/msg00176.html