StreamDevice and libpcre2

[Jörn Dreyer via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

Hi everybody,

I faced today the fact that on my system (OpenSuSE Tumbleweed) there is no libpcre anymore. It got replaced completely by its successor libpcre2.
I came across that when trying to recompile my EPICS installation. It failed when building StreamDevice. 

Now there are three options how to solve that:

1) Install the old libpcre 8.45 from source by hand in the system. Might still work for some time, but what when not? It has not been updated since 2021
and might contain bugs and security issues that will not be fixed.

2) Install libpcre as part of StreamDevice. It faces the same problems as above.

3) Port StreamDevice to libpcre2. That would make it future prove and more easy to maintain.

For me #1 is only a short term solution. For now only my OpenSuSE system is affected and I can build a package for that, but what when systems like Debian/Ubuntu arfe affected?
As I use E3 to deploy my EPICS installations now, I could setup an installation of libpcre for that, but it would require to fork the e3-StreamDevice wrapper from ESS
to add the pcre module dependency. I would prefer not to do that as it could make things incompatible at some time.
So this leaves #3 as the optimal solution an I would like to know if somebody has already looked into that or is actively working on it.

Regards,

Jörn