Unfortunately, there is a bit of confusion about the regular expression backend used by Ocamlnet. Traditionally, this was always PCRE, and not the Str library coming with the OCaml distribution. The reason was that Str did not have a thread-safe API, but it was required to make Ocamlnet thread-safe.
However, recent OCaml releases ship with a version of Str that can be easily made thread-safe. Because of this, the default regexp backend is now Str, with an option to use PCRE instead.
So we have now by default:
netstring
, module Netstring_str
: This is a thread-safe
API around Str. All uses of regular expressions inside the OCamlnet
code base call functions of this module only.-enable-pcre
or
-enable-full-pcre
. The effects are as follows:
netstring
, module Netstring_str
: If only -enable-pcre
is configured, this is still an API around Str. If, however,
-enable-full-pcre
is configured, the module maps the functions
to PCRE calls. Note that the regular expressions still use Str-compatible
syntax, so this switch of the backend is normally invisible to the caller.netstring-pcre
, module Netstring_pcre
: This module
is now available for both configure options. Netstring_pcre
provides
the same API, but uses PCRE-style regular expression syntax. We
provide this module solely for backward compatibility with older
versions of Ocamlnet. Note that previous versions of Ocamlnet added
this module to the netstring
library, but it is now in the new
netstring-pcre
library.
-enable-pcre
: The default regexp engine is still Str, and
Netstring_pcre
is available in the separate library netstring-pcre
-enable-full-pcre
: The regexp engine is changed to PCRE, and
Netstring_pcre
is also available in the separate library netstring-pcre
Actually, Ocamlnet stepped away from PCRE in several phases.
Netstring_str
used Str syntax, but mapped this to PCRE syntax.Netstring_str
can now use Str as backend.
There are still thread-safety issues, so this was not made the default,
and only active after -disable-pcre
.-enable-pcre
reverted to
the previous behavior: PCRE backed Netstring_str
, and Netstring_pcre
was built. The latter module was moved to its own library netstring-pcre
.-enable-full-pcre
with the meaning
that PCRE becomes the backend, and -enable-pcre
has now the weaker
meaning that netstring-pcre
is built.
For packagers of Ocamlnet, the recommendation is to build Ocamlnet
with Str as default engine, and to offer PCRE as option (i.e.
-enable-pcre
). The latter allows it to easily port other software
to the new Ocamlnet style.
It is discouraged to switch completely to PCRE (-enable-full-pcre
).
For users of Ocamlnet, the recommendations are:
Netstring_str
over the default Str API.Netstring_pcre
. This
module will not go away (it is not deprecated).