Re: flex snapshot/beta

[W. L. Estes]

> That's true, but even so, it's still usual practice to not impose these
> hazards onto people getting a tarballed snapshot.  Only people working
> directly with CVS checkouts are supposed to need all the auto* tools. They
> may even need GNU make and GCC for some of the trickier aspects.

I told everyone it was a cvs snapshot. I said there were more things
to be done before the release was made. I told everyone it was beta.

> Avoiding this is what the "make dist" machinery provided by automake is
> largely about: enabling a software maintainer to build a correctly
> self-contained tarball out of a CVS working directory, quickly.  It'll
> include automatically built dependencies from the .dep subdirectory(s)
> into the Makefile.in(s), and make sure all the time stamps of the
> auto*-generated files are correctly ordered, so the tarball won't require
> the user to have auto* tools.

Yes, and when I feel that the flex tree is sufficiently beaten into
shape to allow make dist to produce something fairly useable, I will
release that. Currently, I'm not sure this is the case and released
something else.

> > So, you shouldn't need perl.
> 
> He will, if he's running automake or modern autoconf (2.53 was released a
> day or two ago).

sigh. Thanks for the tip, didn't realize that was so.

--Will