On Wednesday 04 July 2007 06:22:21 James Keenan via RT wrote: > I anticipate writing a series of posts to this RT ticket about different > aspects of config/inter/ lex.pm. To start, let me ask about the > '--maintainer' option to Configure.pl. This configuration option was added > four years ago "to work around imcc dependencies." When set, its most > important effect appears to come in config/auto/gcc.pm later in the > configuration process when it causes Parrot to be compiled with " > -Wlarger-than-4096".
> Since you have to explicitly set certain options to Configure.pl to get > past this point in inter::lex, Parrot's configuration by default does not > attempt to determine whether you have a 'lex'-like program available. > > My question is this: Is this a good thing? > > In other words, is it good that, by default, Parrot's configuration does > *not* attempt to determine whether you have a 'lex'-like or 'yacc'-like > program on disk? Are we depriving the Makefile of any significant > information by customarily sidestepping this probe? Shouldn't Parrot's > default configuration behavior be to seek out information rather than to > skip that search? The --maintainer option exists so that people who want to modify the lexer and parser of IMCC can do so. However, the source tree contains the resulting generated files. This means that it's not a requirement to have a lex or yacc to build Parrot. I suppose the theory is that most people don't need to modify the IMCC parser and lexer. Certainly I lived several happy years without doing so. -- c
