Re: Don't require flex

[Brooks Moses <brooks dot moses at codesourcery dot com>]

Mike Stump wrote:
> We talked about possibly updating flex.  It was withdrawn because it
> would break quite a few developement people with older versions of
> flex.  I don't think that is too compelling, I'd just build and
> install it and file a bug against my OS to upgrade.
>
> Anyway, we can mitigate this for gcc developers, if we wanted, by this
> type of patch (and checking in the build product).  Releases I'm told
> aren't affected because the tar ball includes the flex generated file.
>
> Tested by building c.
>
> Comments?  After the comments die down and if there aren't too many
> compelling reasons not to do this, Ok?

This does put us in a situation where anyone who modifies the .l files 
will then have to rebuild the corresponding .c files with a particular 
canonical version of flex, yes?

In any case, given the number of distributions that have older versions 
of flex and seem unlikely to change that for a while (given the reported 
state of the current versions), I'd be much happier with this type of 
arrangement than one that required me to build and manually install yet 
another dependency program on any machine I want to use for a 
compilation test, just for a couple of files that I'm unlikely to ever edit.

- Brooks