#24 Should esiply support older versions of flex, bison, etc.?

[Richard Uhler]

Esiply doesn't work on all older versions of flex and bison, and presumibly other tools which it relies on. Should we support those older versions? Or require users to get the later versions?

[Richard Uhler]

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I'm leaning towards requiring users to update. I would like to avoid messing up the code just for legacy reasons. Then again, if a fix is simple and clean, it would be nice to work with what versions it can.

[Richard Uhler]

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For example:

with flex version 2.5.4,
I get:
flex scanner.lpp
"scanner.lpp", line 37: unrecognized %option: yyalloc

This is on the seasnet machines, which I would really like to have esiply working on.

[Richard Uhler]

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Of course, an easy solution would be to distribute the generated scanner and parser c files. Then people with the updated version can run flex or bison, but those without can still use the output included in the distribution.

I like that. I vote for not using older versions. Any other comments?