bison 1.875 vs. C++

[John Gatewood Ham]

Hello,

    The bison 1.875 version does not work with OpenOffice 1.1.2.
I was able to create a modified skeleton file that works by
just removing the macro stuff at yyerrlab1.  I see that bison
will let me specify a -S option to specify an alternate skeleton.
However, the build system for OpenOffice is impenetrable and
hopelessly convoluted, so modifying every call of bison in their
stuff is not practical.  I was wondering if there is some BISON_SKELETON
environment variable I can set that gives the full file name for
the skeleton to use [BISON_SKELETON would have the same argument as
the -S option]?  I could not find much in the man page or info file,
so I decided to post here.  I see many times in the archives people
say run the alpha-test version.  By definition an alpha-test version is
even less stable than a release version.  I need more stability, not
less.  If the alpha-test version is more stable and works 'out of the
box', then it should be released and then the problem is solved to
everyone's satisfaction.

I realize it is probably OpenOffice's fault, but I'm looking
for a working solution and other applications are breaking with
bison 1.875, so this seems to be an issue with what people expect
from bison compared to what it currently delivers.  If there will not
be any official release with a working [in terms of all the normal
apps build with it] skeleton file, perhaps you could release a
1.876 version that has only a change to support an environment variable
to use for an alternate skeleton file, and an alternate skeleton file
that doesn't have that macro stuff at yyerrlab1.  With the environment
variable approach, the user would not need to modify any build systems;
they just set the environment variable and export it before starting a
normal build.

If such an environment variable already exists, please document it.

JGH