Re: [Mingw-users] bison 3.0.2 and m4sugar.m4

[Eli Z. <el...@gn...>]

> Date: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 19:12:59 +0200 (CEST)
> Cc: min...@li...
> From: Werner LEMBERG <wl...@gn...>
> 
> 
> >> As mentioned earlier, I don't really need this since I configure
> >> and compile my package within an msys shell.
> > 
> > That's a serious confusion, but I won't explain why unless you ask
> > me to.  If you are happy running MSYS Bison, it's fine by me.
> 
> Well, please explain.  I always thought that the msys binaries are
> (mainly?) used for executing configure scripts or Makefiles within the
> msys shell.

In a nutshell, you don't need an MSYS bison for the same reason you
don't need an MSYS GCC -- these tools are for _producing_ programs,
not _configuring_ them (Bash, Coreutils, Grep, etc.) and guiding their
build (Make).  MSYS was developed to provide the latter functionality,
so I suggest to use it as such.

I know some people disagree -- but those are usually the same people
who use the MSYS Bash as their routine command line, for purposes that
have nothing to do with configuring and building MinGW programs.  They
simply like Bash and the rest of the Posix-like environment better.
My advice to those is to switch to Cygwin, since that's what they
really want.

> In case I'm wrong, I really wonder why executing `bison' on the msys
> prompt works at all...

Because one should be able to build the MSYS toolchain, the one needed
to compile MSYS builds of GNU tools.