KhronosGroup
Whether the OpenCOLLADA can adapt to the PCRE2?
Dear author， The older PCRE library is released in the 1990s and is now at end of life. The newer PCRE2 library is being actively maintained. It's better to use PCRE2 instead of PCRE, do you have any plans？
Seeing that the last commit was in 2018 I don't think it's going to happen
On Arch Linux we are also looking into replacing pcre with pcre2. Seeing that this project seems to be abandoned and blender is the only package using it, we should maybe look into convincing upstream in either adopting it to some extend or dropping its use.
See also https://github.com/RemiArnaud/OpenCOLLADA/issues/4 If it helps I attempted to convert OpenCOLLADA to PCRE 2 in https://github.com/loqs/OpenCOLLADA/tree/pcre2 it does build and blender does build with it with minimal changes for the dependency change. Beyond building it is untested. @brechtvl is the Blender project looking into PCRE 2 support at this point in time?
Blender is looking into moving away from OpenCOLLADA. As we can see, it's sadly unmaintained and it's unlikely that it'll be worked on again now that USD exists.
Khronos has abandoned Collada and all its users a long time ago. OpenUSD has since replaced Collada as the standard source format. Hopefully AOUSD will do a better job at maintaining a standard than Khronos did.
I think it would be quite reasonable for Linux distribution packages of Blender to disable WITH_OPENCOLLADA. I don't think it's worth investing time on this.
The only reason it has not been removed from Blender is that it hasn't caused too much friction for the Blender project, so we might as well keep it. But it will likely be removed in one of the next few versions.
I have retired it from Fedora. Looking at packaging OpenUSD as a replacement.