Gregory (Grisha) Trubetskoy wrote:
>
> OK, here is the flex scoop - as the the docs point out, anything before
> 2.5.31 is not reentrant and I think even uses a slightly different
> interface so older flex won't even process the psp_parser.l file correctly
.
>
> Looking at Fedora Core 4, it still has flex 2.5.4a. (Note that 2.5.31 >
> 2.5.4 because 31 > 4 - I for a while had trouble seeing that for some
> reason), so the new flex is still not commonplace.

This is true. I took a quick survey when I was adding the --with-flex
option, and 2.5.4 was the most common. Oh, and the version numbering
confused me for a while as well, but the configure script does take it
into account when deciding if it has the correct flex.

> So until reentrant flex becomes commonplace, the solution was to include
> a pre-parsed psp_parser.c so that you woudln't need flex at all to
> compile mod_python. Looks like this still should be the case.
>
> The ./configure should just print a warning that if flex is not found or
> too old, should you need to rebuild psp_parser.c you will need to get
> the right version of flex.

When I added the flex detection I had not considered the case where
there was *no* flex on the system... just tested for the correct
version. :-(

Also, I wasn't sure how verbose to make the configure message. I just
figured that people would see the WARNING and then go to the README to
see what the deal was, which would have been the perfect plan... if I
had actually updated the README accordingly.

I'll make the fixes to configure and the README. Is the explanation in
doc-html/inst-configure.html clear or does it need to be revised as well?

Jim

[vbcol=seagreen] 

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