Migrate from obsole pcre library to actively maintained pcre2 library

[moschlar]

Hi there developers,

on Debian, the following wishlist bug has been reported:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1000069

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Dear maintainer,

Your package still depends on the old, obsolete PCRE3¹ libraries
(i.e. libpcre3-dev). This has been end of life for a while now, and
upstream do not intend to fix any further bugs in it. Accordingly, I
would like to remove the pcre3 libraries from Debian, preferably in
time for the release of Bookworm.

The newer PCRE2 library was first released in 2015, and has been in
Debian since stretch. Upstream's documentation for PCRE2 is available
here: https://pcre.org/current/doc/html/

Many large projects that use PCRE have made the switch now (e.g. git,
php); it does involve some work, but we are now at the stage where
PCRE3 should not be used, particularly if it might ever be exposed to
untrusted input.

This mass bug filing was discussed on debian-devel@ in
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2021/11/msg00176.html

Regards,

Matthew

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It'd be great if upstream development could pick this up and try to implement it at a convenient time ;-)

Regards,
Moritz

Footnotes

1. Historical reasons mean that old PCRE is packaged as
   pcre3 in Debian ↩