Use of bison

[Eric Blake]

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According to Francesco Montorsi on 12/27/2005 11:42 AM:
>
> PS: I've recently installed SuSE and I've found that the configure
> script of coreutils
> doesn't check for 'bison' presence: on that distro, it was missing and
> it gave me problems
> later with "make". I think adding a check for 'bison' would be nice...

Hmmm.  m4/getdate.m4 does AC_REQUIRE([gl_BISON]), but m4/bison.m4 DOES
blindly use 'bison -y' rather than 'missing bison -y'.  Maybe bison.m4
should be updated to better check for a new enough bison, perhaps building
on autoconf's AC_PROG_YACC or AC_PATH_PROG.

As for building coreutils, if you pick up a distribution such as 5.93,
bison should not be necessary (GNU coding standards require that source
distributions include the pre-compiled getdate.c along with the source
getdate.y); in a distro, bison is only needed if you touch getdate.y.  But
when building from CVS, projects are free to assume that you have more
development tools on hand, such as a new enough bison; because CVS does
not include generated tools when the developer can be reasonable expected
to regenerate the files himself.

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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