Re: [HACKERS] flex

Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)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.

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