Re: flex snapshot/beta

[Bruce Lilly]

"W. L. Estes" wrote:
> 
[...]
> Any cvs snapshot of flex will exhibit this dependency problem. Any release of
> flex or beta release of flex will not exhibit this dependency
> problem. (You can tell a cvs snapshot because it will have the string
> "snapshot" in its filename and a beta release or release will be of
> the form flex-<versionnumber>.tar.gz)

O.K...so how about putting out a beta in addition to the snapshot
so that those of us who would like to test some of the new flex
features can do so without having to jump through all of the
autoconf hoops?

[...]
> perl is several versions beyond the ones mentioned here. Does your
> platform not have access to recent code?

The version I installed was readily available as a prebuilt
package.  As I don't use perl, I have no desire to install it
from source just so autoconf is happy.

> > > What platform are you working on?
> >
> > UWIN. (see http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/)
> 
> This kind of thing is always hard. Windows is so broken that it
> requires a severe amount of hoop jumping to get it to act
> reasonably. and then "reasonably" is more minimal than most of us
> would like. My personal philosophy on windows variants is that since
> they are so non-standard and proprietary, I put fixing
> windows-specific problems on a lower rung.

Don't be so hasty to jump to conclusions. UWIN is quite good;
in fact it works better than many Linux distributions, in no
small part because it includes the one proper implementation
of the Korn shell. It supports symbolic links on NTFS compatibly
with Windows "shortcuts", something no Linux distribution does
(it's not clear why, since the code for reading and writing windows
shortcuts wasn't particularly difficult to write). UWIN includes a
large number of utilities, several of which are GNU versions.
Building flex 2.54a, etc. under UWIN is painless.

Note that there are no "windows-specific problems" involved;
the problem is that the snapshot distribution of flex requires
(without notice or warning) a bunch of other packages as
prerequisites (current versions of which are either broken or
require yet other specific versions of other packages (or both)).