Re: Upgrading our minimum required flex version for 8.5

Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
> Well, it looks like there's a reason GnuWin32 hasn't advanced beyond
> 2.5.4a - after that the flex developers proceeded to make flex use a
> filter chain methodology that requires the use of fork(). Making it run
> on Windows without the support of Msys or Cygwin would involve some
> significant surgery, I suspect.

Egad, this is a mess :-(. I noticed in the flex changelog that they'd
switched to using m4 instead of implementing all the text processing
themselves. I suppose this is a consequence of that.

But I'm not prepared to agree that M$ lameness should restrict us to
using only a 1990s version of flex. Didn't somebody mention upthread
that there is a Windows port of 2.5.33 available?

> Maybe for the time being we need to think about keeping scan.c in CVS.
> It's not like scan.l gets updated all that often.

We could if we had to, though it amounts to saying that Windows-based
developers don't get to touch the scanner.

regards, tom lane