Re: flex snapshot/beta

[W. L. Estes]

> I hope the build process will be simplified.  Vern's flex could
> be built by running configure and make, without the need for
> specific versions of half a dozen obscure programs to do so.

Such are the hazards of cvs snapshots. Yes, when flex is released, all
the autoconf/automake work will be included so that users don't have
the problems you mention.

> The autogen.sh fails looking for "aclocal".  Downloading
> autoconf, autogen, and automake and trying to build them

you didn't need to download autogen as flex doesn't use that one.

> was a nuisance. First, autoconf is buggy. After patching
> the bugs in its  configure, it complained that it needed
> a specific version of GNU m4 (existing m4 apparently didn't
> have enough "features").  Having then downloaded, built and
> installed GNU m4, I returned to autoconf, which now bitched

The GNU autoconf manual is quite explicit on autoconf's dependency on
GNU m4. They've got a section in the manual on why they need it. (I
can't evaluate their claims because I don't know enough about the
source code.)

> that it couldn't find perl! Perl?! I've never required perl
> to build flex before.  So I installed perl version 5.00502,
> which is apparently still not to autoconf's liking.  Total
> of six packages downloaded to attempt to build one, and at
> this point I've given up.

I find this in the README in the autoconf 2.13 distribution:

Producing configuration scripts using Autoconf requires GNU m4.  You
must install GNU m4 (version 1.1 or later, preferably 1.3 or later
for better performance) before configuring Autoconf, so that
Autoconf's configure script can find it.  The configuration scripts
produced by Autoconf are self-contained, so their users do not need to
have Autoconf (or GNU m4).

Also, some optional utilities that come with Autoconf use Perl, TCL,
and the TCL packages Expect and DejaGNU.  However, none of those
are required in order to use the main Autoconf program.  If they are
not present, the affected Autoconf utilities will not be installed.

So, you shouldn't need perl.

What platform are you working on?

--Will