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Re: flex and dos source files. How is flex built for cygwin


Peter Rehley schrieb:
On Nov 20, 2004, at 12:07 AM, Reini Urban wrote:
Peter Rehley schrieb:
Peter Rehley wrote:
Larry Hall wrote:
We have a customer that is using flex under a custom version of cygwin that we provided them (with source). The customer is having problems when their "*.l" files are in dos format. Flex is taking the lines from the file and adding them into the lex.yy.c file untouched. (i.e. they still have the \n\r at the end), and this causing problems later on.

I tried using the version of flex that comes with the latest version of cygwin (1.5.12) and flex changes the \n\r to just \n, which makes everything work fine. Good I thought since the version of flex we provide is not the latest. I'll just recompile.

But when I tried that with the latest flex (2.5.4a-3) I get the same behavior that the customer is seeing. I get this behavior even if I compile on the latest version of cygwin.

So, my question is what options are used for building flex?


there's no build script and an inactive maintainer. we don't know. hopefully just the standard options.
./configure --prefix=/usr sharedstatedir=/var --mandir=/usr/share/man
make && make install


Using these options the behavior of flex differs from the flex that is shipped with cygwin.

Linking against /usr/lib/binmode.o perhaps?


He meant that by accident flex was linked against binmode.o, which is wrong. It was no advice to reproduce that error with linking against binmode or textmount.

Tried on cygwin 1.5.12
make clean
make LDFLAGS="/usr/lib/binmode.o",

and
make clean
make LDFLAGS="-lbinmode"

but neither helped


for sure not.

However linking the /usr/lib/textmode.o did work
make LDFLAGS="/usr/lib/textmode.o" # <- did the job
Thanks Larry for pointing me in the right directory :)

Oh god. This was the right direction? Sorry no.


If you open your flex input file in a *textmode mount* \r\n will get converted, if you open that in a binmode mount it will not get converted.
$ man mount

The filesystem has been mounted in binmode, but the flex that comes with cygwin translates the files. Both flex and the text file are on binmode mounts.

ok thanks, for confirmation. so cgf should repackage it. it's obviously a bug.

And please add a hint how to reproduce from source, so we don't have to guess. Christofer claims that he didn't link against textmode.a, but it looks like so, or there was some deeper magic behind, which went away suddenly.

So it's entirely a user problem behind the keyboard, and does NOT need a changed linker line. Just tell the user to set this mount to textmode, so that his DOSEOL will get converted. Or convert the DOSEOL by basic commands like unix2dos.

Yes, there are things that the user can do to work around the problem, like saving the file as a unix file, and he is already using dos2unix. However when I was doing research on this problem I found that the flex that comes with a standard cygwin distribution does the \r\n to \n translation when the directory is mounted in binmode.


When I compile flex, it doesn't do the translation. If the flex that came with cygwin didn't do the translation, there would be no questions, but since it does something different, I wanted to know how it was compiled because it was obviously compiled differently. Larry offered a suggestion that led me to the solution that flex had been linked with /usr/lib/textmode.o, because when I use that option I get the same behavior that I see with the flex shipped with cygwin.

It could be that the maintainer of flex used /usr/bin/textmode.o to ensure that dos files wouldn't cause problems.

But if you force linking against binmode or textmode, your flex binary will do no conversions at all, and will only work on the matching mount modes.

If I understand right, then a program linked with textmode won't do a translation in binmode? but this is not the behavior that I'm seeing



This is a pretty basic cygwin FAQ, and I wonder why this needs such a long and wrong consideration.

Just trying to figure why the flex packaged with cygwin behaves differently than one compiled on the system.
--
There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have. (Don Herold)


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