Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] build problem with yacc and ascend-grammar.c

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Guy Harris wrote:
> Aamer Akhter wrote:
> > Looks like the problem was that flex was not installed on the system.
> > Apparently configure did not catch this.
>
> Could you try either hiding or un-installing flex, doing "make 
> distclean" and running the configure script, and making available the 
> output of the configure script and the config.log file, so we can try to 
> figure out why the configure script didn't catch that and fix it if 
> possible?

Don't bother - I found it.

The configure script isn't supposed to catch that, or, rather, it did 
catch that and did what's appropriate.

We don't want to prevent somebody who doesn't have Lex or Flex installed 
from compiling a release tarball; the release tarballs include the 
result of running Lex/Flex on the ".l" files in the source tree (and of 
running Yacc/BYacc/Bison on the ".y" files), so you don't have to have 
those installed.

However, if you're building from SVN (or if you've modified one of the 
.l or .y files), that won't work if you don't have Lex or Flex.

I modified the relevant Makefile.am files so that the resulting 
Makefiles will, in the rules that use Lex/Flex, first check to make sure 
$(LEX) is set to a string that refers to the pathname of an executable 
file and, if it doesn't, they will print an error message and exit with 
an error.

(.y might be trickier, as I think we're using implicit rules for that.)