Re: issue related to bison

[Simon Richter]

Hi,

On 09.11.2017 14:20, Bharath Gattu wrote:

> Previously we are using Bison and Flex in our project to generate some parser 
> files automatically.
> But now we don't want those files to be generated automatically.
> We would like to keep the Bison accessible. But we want to remove the 
> dependency with the Bison so that It would not generate the files 
> automatically.

Many autoconf/automake based projects do this, simply by shipping the
generated files in the source archive. As long as these are up-to-date
when the source archive is built, they will have a newer timestamp than
their input files, so make will not attempt to rebuild them.

This does not work for version control systems, though, as these reset
the timestamp to the check out time (so make rebuilds files changed
during checkout). You can make the corresponding build steps optional,
e.g. by using "BISON = /bin/true" or simply hiding the rebuild rules
unless a certain flag is set.

In autoconf/automake there is the macro AM_MAINTAINER_MODE which
generates a standard configure flag --enable-maintainer-mode, which you
can hide rules such as these. I'm not sure whether bison rules are
automatically disabled outside of maintainer mode — IIRC GNU projects
usually ship the generated files, and bison is not required to build them.

   Simon

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