Re: Upgrading our minimum required flex version for 8.5

> -----Original Message-----
> From: pgsql-hackers-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org [mailto:pgsql-hackers-
> owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Tom Lane
> Sent: Monday, July 13, 2009 7:43 PM
> To: Andrew Dunstan
> Cc: pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
> Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Upgrading our minimum required flex version for
> 8.5
>
> Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
> > Well, it looks like there's a reason GnuWin32 hasn't advanced beyond
> > 2.5.4a - after that the flex developers proceeded to make flex use a
> > filter chain methodology that requires the use of fork(). Making it
> run
> > on Windows without the support of Msys or Cygwin would involve some
> > significant surgery, I suspect.
>
> Egad, this is a mess :-(. I noticed in the flex changelog that they'd
> switched to using m4 instead of implementing all the text processing
> themselves. I suppose this is a consequence of that.
>
> But I'm not prepared to agree that M$ lameness should restrict us to
> using only a 1990s version of flex. Didn't somebody mention upthread
> that there is a Windows port of 2.5.33 available?
>
> > Maybe for the time being we need to think about keeping scan.c in
> CVS.
> > It's not like scan.l gets updated all that often.
>
> We could if we had to, though it amounts to saying that Windows-based
> developers don't get to touch the scanner.
>
> regards, tom lane

Flex 2.5.33 and bison 2.3 are available from mingw for windows.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/

Since mingw programs don't need Cygwin installed, these should probably be OK for most Windows people.

But if really needed, flex 2.5.33 could be ported (m4 is already ported).

I'm also wonderings why flex is a problem, since there is a GNUwin32 (native) port of Bison 2.4.1 and m4,
And Bison uses m4 these days, doesn't it? Perhaps it wouldn't be so hard to update flex to use the same m4 calling that bison uses?

Chuck McDevitt