Re: [HACKERS] flex

I've made the necessary changes to release_prep, makefiles, and
documentation (not sure how the INSTALL file proper is made from the sgml
docs, though). lextest is removed. configure now gives a friendly warning
if it finds flex 2.5.3.

(In fact it seems like some lex files were already generated for
distribution, but now it's all of them.)

On 2000-01-15, Bruce Momjian mentioned:

> 
> Added to TODO list.
> 
> > Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> > >> Maybe this has been discussed before my time, but why exactly is it that
> > >> we don't distribute lex'ed files, as with yacc'ed files?
> > 
> > > Not sure.  Are they more platform-dependent or lexer-dependent?  Doesn't
> > > the lexer call a lexer-specific library?  Not sure.
> > 
> > flex has a lexer-specific library (libfl.a), but as far as I can tell
> > our scanners don't call it.  In fact our build process has no provision
> > for adding -lfl to the link, which I used to think was an oversight, but
> > now it's starting to seem like a good idea.  We could ship scan.c et al
> > in the same way we handle the yacc/bison output files, and it should
> > work everywhere.

This puzzles me a bit still, but it seems to work. GNU suggests putting
yacc and lex files in distributions, so I can't imagine why they would do
that if you need to have lib[f]l.a anyway.

$ nm /usr/lib/libfl.a
libmain.o:
00000000 t gcc2_compiled.
00000000 T main        U yylex
libyywrap.o:
00000000 t gcc2_compiled.
00000000 T yywrap


> > 
> > If we were going to do this, I'd vote for making sure that *all* the
> > yacc files are pregenerated (currently, we only take care of the larger
> > ones), and then most people wouldn't need either flex or bison to build.
> > 
> >             regards, tom lane
> > 
> > ************
> > 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Peter Eisentraut                  Sernanders väg 10:115
peter_e@gmx.net                   75262 Uppsala
http://yi.org/peter-e/            Sweden