On Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:22:33 -0500 Joseph Rawson wrote: > On Sunday 25 October 2009 13:24:42 you wrote: [...] > > I don't think that the Ruby Regexp class has some hard-coded limitation > > for the regular expression length. Can it be that it failed because it > > went out of available memory? > > What is the total capacity of the main memory on your system? > > > I have 3G of ram, and 4G of swap. Enough to hibernate if I ever get it > working right on this laptop. Before running aptitude, I quit most of the > applications and had plenty of spare ram. There was less than 500M in swap, > also.
It seems that it didn't run out of memory. I searched the web about this "regular expression too big" error message: it turns out that Ruby Regexp really seems to have a hard-coded limitation: https://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/87932 Ryan, the above forum thread is about a problem which is pretty similar to what must be done by libdpkg-ruby1.8 in its Packages class's initialize() method: compare with /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/debian.rb:905 One of the proposed solutions was to replace the regexp matching with a hash look-up: https://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/87932#166516 It seems to me that this could be done with package names in the Packages class's initialize() method: this way the Ruby Regexp hard-coded limitation could be worked around. Ryan, what do you think? [...] > > I think that, if there's a way to cope with this issue (maybe by > > splitting too long regular expressions into partial regular expressions > > based on shorter package sub-lists?), it should be implemented at the > > libdpkg-ruby1.8 level, rather than at the apt-listbugs level. > > > The regex created by apt-listbugs is a long concatenation of "or's", and it > should be easy to split those up. I would assume it would be more difficult > to split an arbitrary regex on the ruby level because it would be difficult > to > determine where to split the regex, or even if it was possible to do so. I'm > no expert here, just adding my two cents. :) The regexp is not directly created by apt-listbugs; it's created by libdpkg-ruby1.8, instead. That's why I think the issue can be worked around in libdpkg-ruby1.8 ... -- New location for my website! Update your bookmarks! http://www.inventati.org/frx ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == C979 F34B 27CE 5CD8 DC12 31B5 78F4 279B DD6D FCF4
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