the main practical results of this change are
1. the regex code is no longer subject to LGPL; it's now 2-clause BSD
2. most (all?) popular nonstandard regex extensions are supported

I hesitate to call this a "sync" since both the old and new code are
heavily modified. in one sense, the old code was "more severely"
modified, in that it was actively hostile to non-strictly-conforming
expressions. on the other hand, the new code has eliminated the
useless translation of the entire regex string to wchar_t prior to
compiling, and now only converts multibyte character literals as
needed.

in the future i may use this modified TRE as a basis for writing the
long-planned new regex engine that will avoid multibyte-to-wide
character conversion entirely by compiling multibyte bracket
expressions specific to UTF-8.