Re: installation of bison

[Test User]

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 8:05 AM, Tom M <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I've just downloaded bison 3.0 and I'm having difficulty installing it. I
> have opened a command prompt and am in the directory into which I have just
> extracted bison. The command `./configure; make; make install' doesn't do
> anything. I'm not an expert by any stretch but can you please explain to me
> like you would explain to a child, what do I need to do to install this? I
> also have the same problem with flex. Help would be much appreciated.
>
> Thank you very much,
>
> Tom Mullins
>

Hello Tom,

I take it that you are on Windows? If so, then you will need an environment
in which you can run configure scripts. You can install MinGW and MSYS for
that purpose.

1) Go to www.mingw.org and download mingw-get-setup.exe
<https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/latest/download>. Run it to
install mingw-get, which is the program that will actually install the
various components of MinGW and MSYS that you require.

2) Select "Basic Setup" on the left. On the right, select the following
packages:
- mingw32-base (the C compiler, which is necessary to build bison from
source)
- msys-base (the bash shell and other utilities for running configure
scripts)
You may also want mingw32-gcc-g++ (the C++ compiler). I don't think that a
C++ compiler is necessary to build bison.

3) Assuming that you accepted the default installation directory C:\MinGW,
make sure that C:\MinGW\bin is in your PATH.

4) If there is no shortcut to MSYS, you can start MSYS by running:
C:\MinGW\MSYS\1.0\msys.bat. You will be in a bash window where you can run
configure scripts.

5) Assuming that you have a directory bison-3.0 in your Downloads folder,
you would type something like:

cd /c/users/tom/downloads/bison-3.0
to get there.

MSYS maps your C: drive to /c, D: to /d etc., and / (forward slash) is the
directory separator.

If this is too much trouble, you can search the Internet for bison
binaries. One that I have used is
http://sourceforge.net/projects/winflexbison/.