On 9/11/20 11:41 PM, Jim Meyering wrote:

>> https://bugs.gnu.org/40634#32
>>
>> I'll try to take a look at the later patch.
> 
> Oh! Glad you spotted that.

I took a look and the basic idea sounds good though I admit I did not check 
every detail. While looking into it I found some opportunities for improvements, 
plus I found what appear to be some longstanding bugs in the area, one of which 
causes a grep test failure on Solaris (and I suspect the bug is also on 
GNU/Linux but the grep tests don't catch it). I installed the attached patches 
into Gnulib, updated grep to point to the new Gnulib version, and added a note 
in grep's NEWS file about this.

Patch 1 is what Norihiro Tanaka proposed in Bug#40634#32, except I edited the 
commit message. Patch 2 consists of minor cleanups and performance tweaks for 
Patch 1. (Patches 3 and 4 are omitted as they were installed by others into 
Gnulib at about the same time I was installing these.) Patch 5 fixes a 
dfa-heap-overrun failure on Solaris that appears to be a longstanding bug 
exposed by Patch 1 when running on Solaris. Patch 6 merely cleans up code near 
Patch 5. Patch 7 fixes the use of an uninitialized constraint, which I 
discovered while debugging Patch 5 under Valgrind; this also appears to be a 
longstandiung bug.

Coming up with test cases for all these bugs would be pretty tricky, unfortunately.