Hello Heikki, Thanks for sharing.
Reagrds On Tuesday, January 28, 2014 3:48 PM, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnakan...@vmware.com> wrote: On 01/28/2014 04:28 PM, salah jubeh wrote: >> Yes. Bison and flex are not required when building from a source >> tarball, because the tarball includes the generated files. If you're >> building from a git checkout, however, then you need bison and flex. You >> will get an error at make, and IIRC a warning at ./configure > > Thanks for the quick reply. For curiosity reasons why the differentiation > between tar and git. We include the generated files in the tarballs for the convenience of people who just want to download, compile, and install the software. Fewer dependencies is good in that case. It also ensures that an official version, ie. from a tarball, is always built using the same version of bison/flex. Whereas if you do a git checkout, you're probably a developer, and want to modify the sources. It's not unreasonable to expect a developer to have bison and flex installed. Also, including the generated files in the git repository would cause unnecessary diffs when people have different versions of bison/flex installed on their development boxes. We've chosen a different approach with autoconf; the configure file is generated from configure.in, but we include the configure file in the git repository. It does add some extra effort to developers that need to modify configure.in, but OTOH, if you don't modify it, you don't need to have autoconf installed. - Heikki
