Re: [PATCH] examples: add new build scenario test case

[Akim Demaille]

Hi Kaz,

> Le 20 sept. 2020 à 22:01, Kaz Kylheku <kaz@kylheku.com> a écrit :
> 
> On 2020-09-19 02:44, Akim Demaille wrote:
>> Hi Kaz,
>> I guess this example can be used as a basis to discuss of "one
>> feature at a time", as I mentioned in the other thread.
>> I fully disagree with what you are doing here.  You completely
>> discard features that have been designed to address your exact
>> needs: specifying what goes into the headers.  That's the point
>> of "%code requires" and "provides", introduced in Bison 2.4 (that's
>> twelve years ago!).  These features are so obviously needed that
>> even Byacc features them now.
> 
> Byacc added %code in November 2019; it has not even been a year!
> 
> I will definitely look into using %code provides, maybe in a three
> to five year time frame.

So I'm afraid there's nothing I can do for you.  You have framed
yourself into too constrained a set of requirements.  You refuse
to ship generated parsers, you refuse to emit requirements over
the version of the generator, you refuse to embrace the idioms that
have been designed more than ten years ago (!) to address your
problems, you refuse to choose once and for all between byacc and
bison, etc. so you are just outside our scope.


> Anyway, I cannot fix my old commits to use that approach.

One way to address your problems of the past would be to jump
in past and apply the suggestions I made five years ago.

You chose a different path, that's entirely your right.  But
don't play it surprised that there are rough edges.


> I can try to rework the test case so that it doesn't do the sed
> hack for removing yyparse from y.tab.h, yet still covers everything
> that is salient, in order to keep it working.

I will not install your test case.  For instance you still
have not understood that the examples are show cases, they are
the exact opposite of what you are looking for: these examples
will always be updated to demonstrate the best approach with
the current release of Bison.  Not the way to be compatible
with Bison 2.3 or byacc.



>> The following commit shows how this example should look like.
>> I've made it available as https://github.com/akimd/bison/tree/kaz
>> if you want an easier access.
> 
> Is there no existing example with a test case covering this?

Of course it's covered by the test suite.  And I trust you
know how to play with git grep to look for that by yourself.

> But that doesn't negate the validity of the original.

You like to claim that, and you did that for five years now:
"hey, look at that!  I could write that ten years with Bison 2.x,
and Bison 3.x breaks this!".

You don't care about any of the suggestion I made.  You just
keep on explaining how incredibly bad Bison is maintained.

What I can do to relieve you from your problems is to
wrap Docker images with old Bisons.  That would certainly make
it easy for your users to find the exact version you want, and
in twenty years, you will still be able to build your tarballs
from ten years ago.  But I'm pretty sure you'll consider this
non acceptable either.

Well, I spent quite some time on the problems of Kaz Kylheku,
and now I will spend more time on the problems of Bison users.


Cheers.