# Complaining about upgrading regexp

Michael Brundage (anomaly@u.washington.edu)
Fri, 29 Sep 1995 12:07:31 PDT

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    [much grumbling...]
    >Bah, I'd better stop rambling. This looks like it isn't going to be a
    >trivial server change.
    >It would be great if people posted what changes are needed in LambdaCore.
    >Personally, I think this is a huge waste of time. Sometimes, broken seems
    >to be better.

    How about this:  Replace all your uses of the builtin match() with #0:match().
    Make your own builtin old_match() to do what the old builtin match() did
    (namely, not work correctly).  Have #0:match() call the builtin old_match(),
    until you're gradually able to update all your DB code to properly handle
    the changes (by that time, the new match() ought to have its own newly
    documented bugs).  This way you can mitigate future headaches, rather than
    take out your frustrations on Pavel, who I'm sure has plenty of other things
    to do than feel sorry for those of us, like you and me, who designed our
    systems with poor support for future changes.  Personally, I'm going to
    change all my calls to builtin() with calls to #0:(builtin)() now while my
    DB is still small, to avoid the fun later on.  The (minor) loss in code
    efficiency will more than make up for the gain in time necessary to upgrade
    the DB to match future versions of the server.