Re: Upgrading our minimum required flex version for 8.5

Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
> OK, the fly in this ointment turns out to be MSVC. The latest flex 
> from GnuWin32 is 2.5.4a, and building 2.5.35 for Windows is turning 
> out to be quite a pain. Luckily, MinGW has a pre-built modified 2.5.33 
> available, and I have installed this (also needed msys-regex), and 
> then I jury rigged my MSVC build to use it, so we still have one MSVC 
> working OK in the buildfarm. But we can hardly ask people to install 
> MinGW/MSys so they can build with MSVC, that's horribly ugly. I'll 
> work on getting version 2.5.35 build for Windows in a way that works 
> standalone, and push it somewhere (maybe the dev wiki).
>
>

Well, it looks like there's a reason GnuWin32 hasn't advanced beyond 
2.5.4a - after that the flex developers proceeded to make flex use a 
filter chain methodology that requires the use of fork(). Making it run  
on Windows without the  support of Msys or Cygwin would involve some 
significant surgery, I suspect.

Maybe for the time being we need to think about keeping scan.c in CVS. 
It's not like scan.l gets updated all that often.

cheers

andrew