Hi Markus,
On 05/08/16 09:45, Markus Geimer wrote:
Hi all,
Is there any particular reason why the flex-2.6.0 easyconfigs
depend on Bison rather than builddepend?
My understanding is that flex can be happily used w/o Bison, and
this corresponds to what distro packagers think. In Debian, for
example, Bison is only a 'suggests' of the flex package [1] --
the most loose type of dependency supported (declares that a
package may be more useful when the suggested package is also
installed, but it is perfectly reasonable to install without).
However, it is listed under 'Build-Depends' in the control file.
That said, I believe M4 is actually a real dependency, see [2].
It's possible/likely that we haven't been thorough enough here...
If Bison is indeed just a build dependency for flex, then we should
update the flex easyconfigs accordingly.
In practice, Bison and flex are used together quite often, so it'll only
matter little (but doesn't hurt to specify things correctly).
Likewise for M4, even though there have been PRs where M4 is added as a
(build) dep for flex, cfr.
https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/2681 .
These are pretty common dependencies, so it's quite likely the OS
provides something that builds can fall back onto.
I hope we can get to testing easyconfigs in an isolated enviroment (e.g.
a Nix jail) soon, which will help alleviate some of these issues.
regards,
Kenneth
