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(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.

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
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