Hi Andreas,
Thank you very much for working on this -- sorry for the delay in response!
Yeah, we probably don't want to change the installed binary (reflex) and
library names (libreflex) if we don't have to. There is also a library
called libreflexmin.... but I see that CMakeLists.txt doesn't support it.
For the package name, I think we should use re-flex, that seems to be
the package name used in: homebrew, macports, nixpkgs, freebsd pkg, and
opensuse. I think this would be the name for (i) the source package and
(ii) the package that contains the binary 'reflex'.
I may try to improve the cmake script in the downstream repo, because it
lacks some distinctions that the author's simple `build.sh` has. But
those distinctions are not super-important for my use case.
-BenRI
P.S Resending, because I accidentally left off the debian-med list the
first time.
On 7/22/26 7:46 AM, Andreas Tille wrote:
Hi Benjamin,
Am Mon, Jul 20, 2026 at 12:03:38AM -0400 schrieb Benjamin Redelings:
Would anyone anyone would be able to package the re-flex lexer generator?
It provides a mostly drop-in replacement for the venerable `flex` software,
plus extensions for unicode handling and other things:
https://github.com/Genivia/RE-flex
Thank you for the hint - I've started with the packaging at
https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/re-flex
I'm asking because version 4.3 of my bali-phy software is going to link
against libreflex. bali-phy is packaged in Debian -- thanks so much to the
debian-med team! -- but re-flex does not have a Debian package.
Interestingly, it seems like the ugrep package contains a vendored copy
of re-flex, so there are now at least two packages that depend on re-flex.
I've Cc-ed Ricardo, who is the maintainer for ugrep.
The re-flex author seems relatively responsive, so I think he would be
relatively easy to work with, if needed. I have submitted some PRs to
re-flex, and they seem to get a reply within a week. If there are some
issues that come up, I'm happy to help out.
I'm unsure about the names. The binary is called 'reflex' (without
the dash) and the library packages should probably also be named like
the library (also without the dash) libreflex? (need to check SOVERSION)
and libreflex-dev. Unfortunately the (source) package name 'reflex'
is taken in Debian and we might consider reflex-tools for the binary
package and leave the source package re-flex. What do you think?
Kind regards
Andreas.
