[master] grep -i fails to work on intrepid

[Duncan Sands]

Binary package hint: grep

Hardy Heron (correct):

$ echo A | grep -i a
A

Intrepid Ibis (wrong):

$ echo A | grep -i a
$

Same if you grep a file containing A.
This is GNU grep 2.5.3.

[brianhanna (brianhanna)]

I can confirm the bug

[Javier Noval (javiernoval)]

I can confirm this bug happens in UTF-8 locales.

This case fails:
$ echo Y | LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 grep -i '[y]'
$

And this one works as expected:
$ echo Y | LC_ALL=C grep -i '[y]'
Y
$

The patch 66-match_icase.patch is supposed to make the case-insensitive searches work in non-UTF-8 locales, but it appears not to be working (maybe it's not being applied at all?).

[Steven Shiau (stevenshiau)]

I confirm this bug in 8.10 alpha1, too.
It was working in Ubuntu 8.04.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Confirming, regarding all the comments above.

black:~$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu intrepid (development branch)
Release: 8.10
black:~$ apt-cache policy grep
grep:
  Installed: 2.5.3~dfsg-5ubuntu1
  Candidate: 2.5.3~dfsg-5ubuntu1

[nine (niin-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

The patch mentioned in comment 2 is applied (according to the buildlog: http://launchpadlibrarian.net/15408026/buildlog_ubuntu-intrepid-i386.grep_2.5.3~dfsg-5ubuntu1_FULLYBUILT.txt.gz).

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

It took me some time but here I am. This problem is related to grep _and_ the version of libc6.

For some reason, in Intrepid with libc6-dev 2.8 the macro __USE_GNU is not defined in /usr/include/regex.h . Then, the configure script fails to test the libc regex, and grep is build using the internal regex library (the one shipped with grep). This library seems to be quite broken when it comes to deal with multibytes strings and ignore case options. It doesn't even compile when you're forcing multibyte support.

This is confirmed by the fact that "grep" builds and works fine on debian/sid and that the strictly same package (the debian source) build on Ubuntu shows the ignorecase issue.

Then the easiest thing to do is to define the macro _GNU_SOURCE to force the use of the libc regex.

A proposition of patch is attached.

Can someone review it ?

Thanks.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Thanks for debugging this! I'll apply this or a similar change soon.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package grep - 2.5.3~dfsg-5ubuntu2

---------------
grep (2.5.3~dfsg-5ubuntu2) intrepid; urgency=low

  * debian/rules: Configure with --without-included-regex, so that the
    broken configure test does not erroneously think that our glibc doesn't
    support regexes. (It fails to use _GNU_SOURCE in configure). The internal
    one is broken and e. g. does not work with "grep -i". Thanks to
    Jean-Baptiste Lallement for tracking this down! (LP: #241990)

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:43:28 +0100

[nine (niin-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

The grep package failed to authenticate when I updated my Intrepid host just now. The 92 other packages didn't :) , so I'm pretty sure it's grep.

[nine (niin-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

Please ignore my previous comment.

[Artur Rona (ari-tczew)]

 grep (2.5.4-3) unstable; urgency=low

   * Updated copyright. The grep.texi removal notice is not longer
     needed.
   * Adding --without-included-regex to solve problems with glibc-2.9.
     Thanks to the Ubuntu team. (Closes: #491158)
   * Updated debhelper compat to version 7

 -- Santiago Ruano Rincón <email address hidden> Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:50:47 +0100