Re: trouble compiling

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 05/18/2012 01:17 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> On 18 May 2012 13:50, Daniel J Sebald<address@hidden>  wrote:
> > Apparently I need to reconstruct lex.cc, so why wasn't this flagged
> > as an error?  Any reason?  Or just an oversight in a rather big
> > config process?
>
> Oh, by the way, the reason that error message about flex is phrased
> that way because it's primarily aimed at people who work from
> tarballs. In a tarball, lex.cc is supplied, hence the word
> "reconstruct". The build system has a few extra steps when building
> from hg. I'm not sure how to document more prominently that more work
> needs to be done to compile from hg than a tarball. I guess expanding
> the HACKING file?
>
> - Jordi G. H.
> x

Is it the case that flex, gperf, bison, and texi2dvi are not required 
when getting the code as a released tarball because lex.cc and the 
documentation are already present?  Is there some way to test whether 
the code originates from a tarball in the config process (e.g., check 
for lex.cc)?  Requiring those would be adding a few more items to the 
list of required extra utilities which seems to be around a dozen or so. 
 I can also understand not requiring something that isn't needed.

Dan