Re: flex beta 2.5.23 released

[W. L. Estes]

On Monday, 25 November 2002,12:49 -0500, Bruce Lilly wrote:

> I don't quite follow that; on a system with no bundled compiler (e.g.
> recent Solaris), there are no headers unless supplied with a separate
> compiler (such as gcc), no? [No, I'm not picking on Sun, the same
> applies to MS Windows, which has no headers unless supplied with a
> separate compiler.]

NO. There's usually a background library somewhere which provides the
header files and such. gcc has some header files which provide
interfaces for some things, but on our solaris machines, the C header
files come largely from Sun.

> >Please list the platforms on which flex will not compile. Please send
> >any configure output and such that will help us understand the nature
> >of those systems.
> 
> For the record, do you want all of the output posted to the list or
> off-list?  In the case of the FLEX_NEEDS... issue that means *two* sets
> of configure output, two sets of config.* files, two sets of output
> from make, etc. in addition to patches, description, and so on.

Off-list is fine. No need clogging up everyone's mail.

> It's per-system configuration nevertheless. For practical software
> incorporating a lexical analyzer built by flex and distributed, that
> essentially means something of complexity on the order of autoconf
> since the makefile etc. that will be used to build the target software
> which incorporates the flex-built .c file either will or won't need
> to be compiled with a cc -D option, and that will vary from system to
> system.

Certainly that's not the goal. But you're sending me examples and such
off-list so I'll look at it.

> > It's only necessary to pass the switch when building
> >flex. once flex is built, flex does what it was told to do for your 
> >system.
> 
> Unfortunately that's not correct (at least for 2.5.23); each .c file
> generated by fles 2.5.23 might or might not require a macro definition
> (and that's what configuration is) to compile on each system on which the
> flex-generated lexical analyzer will be built.

Ah, that sounds like a bug. I'll see what I can do.