Re: updating flex?

[Patrick Welche <prlw1%cam.ac.uk@localhost>]

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 01:15:57PM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> Our flex is at 2.5.4, and upstream is now at 2.5.35.  I noticed this
> because I was trying to build something that used newer features.  We
> have 2.5.35 in pkgsrc.
> 
> Does anyone have opinions about whether or not we should upgrade the
> in-tree flex to a more recent version?  It seems that we should, absent
> some reason why it would be troublesome.
> 
> The flex homepage seems to be:
> 
>   http://flex.sourceforge.net/

I have had a go, and seem to be getting there. The most "interesting" part
is that it insists on GNU m4, yet our m4 -g does the trick (given a way
of getting the -g into filter_create_ext() in main.c)

One side line in testing (one of the advantages of the newer flex being
improved c++ support) seems to be that CLEANFILES is used at the beginning
of say bsd.prog.mk in

cleanextra: .PHONY
.if defined(CLEANFILES) && !empty(CLEANFILES)
        rm -f ${CLEANFILES}
.endif

but it doesn't seem that later CLEANFILES+=some flex files
actually get added. I haven't reached the bottom of that yet,
but wondered whether it was worth creating a
bsd.clean.mk which was included by bsd.prog.mk and bsd.lib.mk.
bsd.files.mk could then include it too, and could be used in
src/share/examples/*/Makefile rather than bsd.prog.mk which
really isn't the obvious choice. (memories of bin/7293)

Cheers,

Patrick