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Re: raising minimum version of Flex
"Steven Bosscher" <stevenb.gcc@gmail.com> writes:
> 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.
That doesn't sound right. It see flex being run every time I create a
new object directory, even though I don't modify the flex input files.
We ship gengtype-lex.c with releases, so people building the compiler
from releases shouldn't have to worry, but it is still an issue for
developers.
Ian