make building work again when flex is not installed #189
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This explicitly reverts commit 3f89340 because it was a bad idea. The motivating bug report was LudovicRousseau#124 and the issue there occurred when building from a git clone, running ./bootstrap && ./configure && make, and having: - configure succeed - make "succeeeds" at having $LEX run, do nothing and fail to generate required sources - compiling nonexistent files fail with highly confusing errors The autoconf manual has always documented the correct way to handle this is to check if lex is unavailable, and set it to the famous automake wrapper "missing", which checks if a program is missing at build time rather than at ./configure time, and fails the build if the rule cannot be run. This means: When building from a git clone, if flex is not available then - configure succeeds - make fails to run $LEX, and tells you to install flex The previous attempt to fix the highly confusing error instead resulted in configure erroring out, and saying flex is required, even when it is *not* required because a `make dist` tarball was used, which contains pregenerated tokenparser.c for the express purpose of making flex unnecessary. See autoconf documentation on $LEX: https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.72/html_node/Particular-Programs.html#index-AC_005fPROG_005fLEX-1 And automake documentation on why to use "missing": https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/maintainer_002dmode.html
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Thanks Note that ./configure is now "deprecated". You should use meson instead. |
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This explicitly reverts commit 3f89340 because it was a bad idea.
The motivating bug report was #124 and the issue there occurred when building from a git clone, running ./bootstrap && ./configure && make, and having:
The autoconf manual has always documented the correct way to handle this is to check if lex is unavailable, and set it to the famous automake wrapper "missing", which checks if a program is missing at build time rather than at ./configure time, and fails the build if the rule cannot be run. This means:
When building from a git clone, if flex is not available then
The previous attempt to fix the highly confusing error instead resulted in configure erroring out, and saying flex is required, even when it is not required because a
make disttarball was used, which contains pregenerated tokenparser.c for the express purpose of making flex unnecessary.See autoconf documentation on $LEX:
https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.72/html_node/Particular-Programs.html#index-AC_005fPROG_005fLEX-1
And automake documentation on why to use "missing": https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/maintainer_002dmode.html