failed make with gcc 3.2.2 and flex 2.5.31

[Peter B. Steiger]

Bryan Koschmann sez:
>Just did a fresh install of Slack 9.0. I removed flex 2.5.4a and upgraded
>with source to 2.5.31. I tried the latest tarball of lilypond with no
>luck, and tried a cvs version from last night. When doing a make it dies
>with this:
{snip for clarity}
>includable-lexer.cc:31: `yy_current_buffer' undeclared (first use this
>   function)

>If you could provide any help it would be great. With the tarball version
>I tried the patch in the directory, and various others from maillist
>archives (each after deleting and untarring a new lilypond).

Bryan,

You can't get there from here.  I went around that block about 119 times
(stubborn doesn't even begin to describe me) with various versions of flex
and bison, with and without the patches, and got variations on that same 
error every time.  I also found out the hard way that the warning in 
INSTALL.txt is still accurate when it says flex + gcc 3.x is bad medicine.

There's no archive of the flex developers list so you can't search there
for discussions on the subject, but our own lilypond list has the answer
here:
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2002-09/msg00154.html
The flex people were aware of the bug back in September and claimed
it was fixed, but no matter which version of flex you use gcc 3.x still
won't produce a version that can work with lilypond.

In the end, the only way for me to get lilypond to play nice was to install
gcc 2.95, use that to build flex 2.54 and bison 1.25, and use those (still
with gcc 2.95) to build lilypond.  After that I was able to remove gcc 2.95,
but the whole process was definitely the long way of getting to my 
destination!

I assumed (bad idea, I know) that you need to use the same gcc on
lilypond as you used for flex; for all I know it would have been OK to
delete 2.95 as soon as flex was installed.

I don't know that it makes a difference, but for what it's worth I'm using
a Linux From Scratch build with the bare minimum of installed pacakges,
all built from source, to have a working X system.

Good luck, and may the force be with you!  And if you find a way to 
build lilypond with the newest stable flex & gcc 3.x, let us all know the
secret of your success.
pbs
--------
Peter B. Steiger
Cheyenne, WY