[GRASS5] Thought on my CVS problem

[James Cameron]

On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 10:07:54AM +0200, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 13, 2000 at 07:06:05PM +1100, James Cameron wrote:
> > Those people can go get a recent autoconf or flex/bison installed, if
> > they are wanting to compile the sources.  
> They could, but if it is unnecessary it is an unnecessary hassle.
> (And it can be quite a pain getting autoconf flex and bison installed.)

If there are problems installing autoconf, flex or bison, these should
be fixed.  I've never had problems.  Dodging the problems by shipping
GRASS source in a partially built form may hide them, stopping them
from being fixed.

The generated configure script should stay.  It should also be
expanded to check for flex and bison.  configure.in currently makes no
mention of bison/yacc, though it does mention AC_PROG_LEX.  If you
intend to include flex output, it should be removed from configure.in.

My main reason for suggesting that lex and yacc output not be present
is that they are not source files.  Portability is a side issue.  Open
Source generally accepted practice is to only include source files and
the output of autoconf.

> > Some of the build utilities
> > may have architecture dependencies that render their output wrong for
> > the platform the end user of a tarball tries to compile on.
> But not configure, flex and bison.

I checked the output of the same version of bison on Compaq Tru64
UNIX, on Debian GNU/Linux on Alpha, and on Intel, and there are no
significant differences.  However I can't be sure there are no
differences on other platforms.  The checks made by the configure
script of bison 1.28 are quite extensive, covering many areas of
difference between platforms.  This includes operating system
interfaces, not just processor architecture differences.  I do not
think it is safe to assume there will be no future portability issues,
unless you were to include flex and bison sources within the GRASS
source tarball.

-- 
James Cameron    mailto:quozl at us.netrek.org     http://quozl.netrek.org/

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