On 13 September 2000, Thomas Heller said:

This may not be directly related to distutils, it may also be a bug in 1.6 and 2.0b1 re implementation.

'setup.py sdist' with the current distutils CVS version hangs while parsing MANIFEST.in, executing the re.sub command in these lines in text_file.py:

    # collapse internal whitespace (*after* joining lines!)
    if self.collapse_ws:
        line = re.sub (r'(\S)\s+(\S)', r'\1 \2', line)

That was a very suboptimal use of regex substitution; I discovered (and fixed) this several months ago in the version of text_file.py we use at work, but forgot to propagate the change to the distutils version. Coincidentally, I finally got around to doing that this weekend:

revision 1.10 date: 2000/09/16 18:04:55; author: gward; state: Exp; lines: +31 -27 [change from 2000/04/17, propagating now to distutils copy] Dropped the 'collapse_ws' option and replaced it with 'collapse_join' -- it's *much* faster (no 're.sub()') and this is the reason I really added 'collapse_ws', ie. to remove leading whitespace from a line being joined to the previous line.

So this problem should no longer be there.

However, if the sre engine really did *hang* (whereas pcre was just slow), that might be an sre bug.

[...a few moments pass...]

Yep, you're right: if I do this single, simple regex substitution with Python 2.0, it hangs. I've submitted a bug to SourceForge -- thanks!

Greg