tests fail on darwin-arm64 (Apple Silicon)

[jpgoldberg]

When I build from source on an Apple Silicon (arm64-apple) system I get loads of compiler warnings (attached below), which all seem to center around the regex library. When I run make in the ./test I get a large number of failures (summary attached below)

I believe that the problem stems from using a "long depreciated" regex library. Quoting from https://www.gnu.org/software/regex/

The standalone GNU regex library has long been decommissioned.

For a current regex implementation, we recommend using the regex code from Gnulib; see also the Regular expressions chapter in the Gnulib manual, which is essentially the old standalone regex manual. (Also, if all you need is POSIX regexp functionality, any modern C library should provide that.)

System and environment

Hardware

• Model Name: MacBook Pro
• Model Identifier: MacBookPro17,1
• Chip: Apple M1
• Total Number of Cores: 8 (4 performance and 4 efficiency)
• Memory: 16 GB

OS

macOS BigSur 11.6

% uname -a
Darwin RobotM1.local 20.6.0 Darwin Kernel Version 20.6.0: Mon Aug 30 06:12:20 PDT 2021; root:xnu-7195.141.6~3/RELEASE_ARM64_T8101 arm64

Build environment

On macOS gcc is a wrapper for clang that handles gcc command line flags and some compile behaviors

 % gcc --version 
Configured with: --prefix=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr --with-gxx-include-dir=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/usr/include/c++/4.2.1
Apple clang version 13.0.0 (clang-1300.0.29.3)
Target: arm64-apple-darwin20.6.0
Thread model: posix
InstalledDir: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin

I can provide config.status if that would be useful.

Attached logs

• The make output (stdout and stderr) make.log
• make output in ./test test-make.log

If you would like all of the *.out files from that directory, let me know.

[ge-ne]

The majority of problem seem to be the data type bool. Maybe I can work on a fix for this.

I am well aware that BibTool includes an outdated regex library. I have made an attempt many years ago to replace it with something else. The problem is portability. I can make it work on a more or less modern POSIX system. But I would like to support as many platforms as possible. Maybe I should experiment with autoconfig to use posix if available and the ancient library as fallback...