Comment 20 for bug 1636666

I did some quick searches to assess the state of upstream PCRE2 support in the packages listed on Jeremy’s tracker. It’s better than I thought:

• ClamAV, Git, HAProxy, SELinux, PHP, Qt, and VTE upstream all support PCRE2.
• PHP, Qt, and VTE upstream all _require_ PCRE2 now.
• In fact, Qt in Ubuntu 17.10 main is _already using_ (a bundled copy of) PCRE2! Go look at the build log.

https://github.com/vrtadmin/clamav-devel/commit/85131d40f29900109798b1af4a71d79e8ff996a9
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/git/+bug/1729075
https://git.haproxy.org/?p=haproxy.git;a=commitdiff;h=f2592b29f13907ddf2bba42d00bc41cb8ee5b69b
https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/commit/50f0910cf05bdc1d10710c7c3fb748a178473387
https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/2857
https://github.com/qt/qtbase/commit/9ff34b3a088867d66daa782a4d5dbed99cd8ede4
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/1666264

So it seems unlikely that sticking our head in the sand will keep PCRE2 out of main for very long even if we wanted that.