Re: Bug#196800: flex mustn't assume stdint.h is available on allplatforms
On Fri, 13 Jun 2003 23:01:40 -0400, Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@debian.org> said:
> Certainly you have not broken Debian; but I maintain that this
> short-sightedness does damage Debian's usefulness as a development
> platform, for all those targets which many more practical developers
> must support in order to do their jobs.
Well, there were reasons, should you care. I held off the
transition for a long time. Unfortunately, the C++ scanners generated
by the old flex would not work with the gcc version in
unstable. I held off on the transition as long as I could, trying to
patch better support in old flex, but my scaffolding of fixes was
groaning under its own weight, and there were bug reports pointing
out the shiny new compiler support in upstream flex.
The new Flex supported the compiler we were shipping; it had a
nice new test suite, and I incorporated passing the test suite as a
part of the debian build process; I looked at the tests, and they
seemd far more extensive than anything we ever had before (all we had
before was flex to be able to compile itself). The temptation of that
test suite was the last straw.
I must confess to being startled by the magnitude of changes
without a bump in the version number.
In any case, I see this division of flex-old and flex as the
best solution to the issue at hand. The new flex has exciting new
features, but breaks with POSIX, and is not backwards compatible.
It's scanners ought to work on most modern OS's.
Think of this as part of the g++ transition.
manoj
--
Fred noticed his roommate had a black eye upon returning from a
dance. "What happened?" "I was struck by the beauty of the place."
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
1024R/C7261095 print CB D9 F4 12 68 07 E4 05 CC 2D 27 12 1D F5 E8 6E
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
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