On Fri, Aug 17, 2001 at 08:41:36AM -0700, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> dear all,
>
> is either yacc/lex or bison/flex a standard thing to be on peoples' systems?
> do most distros install them by default?
>
> i know they're pretty standard on debian, but i'm mainly curious about
> standard redhat, mandrake and suse installs.
AFAICT, it's standard on RedHat.
However, a good rule of thumb is not to require it to be installed if
it's a "production" package - IOW, have the .y files already compiled
into .c files. You can assume it for "developer" packages.
> the issue here is that i need to find a better way of parsing input.
> currently, i do a lot of string acrobatics. the glib library has made the
> acrobatics less death-defying, but it's still a kludge.
>
> i've been thinking about using libregex, but it's really not as powerful as i
> would've liked it to be. and it's certainly not convenient. i thought
> about libpre3, but i KNOW this library isn't installed by default on many
> distros.
Ah, I see now. You don't have to worry about bison or flex being
installed on other people's systems - just use it on your own, and
distribute only the .c output files from them with your gzipped
tarfiles.
Bison/flex aren't libraries - they're compilers; they compile
bison/flex code into C code. So once you've compiled on your system,
you no longer have to fuss with what other people have (besides a C
compiler).
HTH,
Micah
