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Re: raising minimum version of Flex
On 21 Jan 2007 22:13:06 -0800, Ian Lance Taylor <iant@google.com> wrote:
Ben Elliston <bje@au1.ibm.com> writes:
> I think it's worth raising the minimum required version from 2.5.4 to
> 2.5.31.
I want to point out that Fedora Core 5 appears to still ship flex
2.5.4. At least, that is what flex --version reports. (I didn't
bother to check this before.) I think we need a very strong reason to
upgrade our requirements ahead of common distributions. We've already
run into that problem with MPFR.
For MPFR, everyone needs to have the latest installed to be able to
build gcc. That is not the case with flex. No-one needs flex at all to
build gcc, except gcc hackers who modify one of the (two or three?)
remaining flex files and regenerate the lexers. So you can't really
compare flex and MPFR this way.
If flex 2.5.31 is already four years old, it doesn't seem unreasonable
to me to expect people to upgrade if their distribution ships with an
even older flex.
Gr.
Steven