Re: flex 2.5.21 released

[W. L. Estes]

On Tuesday, 17 September 2002,15:05 -0400, Bruce Lilly wrote:

> Not if there *isn't* an automake (and there's not one
> included in the .tar.gz flex distribution).

Bruce, automake is a separate program. It's not included because we're
only interested in its output. If you want to modify flex, then you
have to buy into the tools we use to build it. There's no way around
that. But for folks who want to build flex and nothing more, we make
that as easy as having a C compiler. That's the best we can do. If you
can't get automake to run on your system, then talk to your vendor as
they should be able to help you with that.

> But in the .tar.gz distribution, Makefile.in already
> exists and is never modified by configure et al.  The
> build process from that distribution is configure ->
> make; automake isn't involved.

Believe me, Bruce, that's the way you want it. (You, in fact,
complained when all there was was a cvs snapshot and you had to have a
whole host of tools to get flex to build.)

> I can't generate a patch for Makefile.am that uses automake
> on *your* system, because I don't have access to it (and
> I don't want to have such access).

Bruce, you patch Makefile.am as best you can--Makefile.am works more
or less like a makefile. automake crunches Makefile.am into
Makefile.in--which isn't system dependent. And if, locally, you have
to patch Makefile.in because you don't have automake and friends,
that's fine. but sending the flex maintainers patches against
Makefile.in won't help. Such patches don't make sense in the flex
build process.

> Never mind.  If it's going to get that complicated,
> I'll deal with generating legible documentation locally.

Please talk to the automake maintainers. This is really an automake
issue. And I'm sure that their goal is not to produce hard-to-read
documentation.