Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] FreeBSD/Flex doc update

[Tony Theodore]

On 8 April 2010 18:20, Volker Grabsch <address@hidden> wrote:
> Tony Theodore <address@hidden> schrieb:
>> A small doc update as GStreamer requires Flex version >= 2.5.31 and
>> the version in FreeBSD base system is too old.
>
> Ouch. Does that mean we it is impossible to build the complete
> mingw-cross-env on FreeBSD?

No, everything else builds fine (apart from vmime - a separate issue),
it's just a different end to the conversation we had a few months ago
when first adding flex to the requirements.

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/mingw-cross-env-list/2010-02/msg00037.html

The version in the base system seems to be about twelve years old, so
we need to use ports/packages instead. From the flex website, it's
probably not even worth adding the >= 2.5.31 to the main requirements
list, as this version was released in 2003 and considered obsolete.

> Isn't there a nicer solution, such as building GStreamer in a
> way that it doesn't require Flex?
>
> In most cases, Flex is called when some file timestamps are
> messed up. Most packages already provide the C code generated
> by Flex in their source tarball. Is this true for GStreamer, too?
> Or is GStreamer really an exception to this?

I'm not really sure, I didn't look into it much since (a modern) flex
is already a requirement.

Cheers,

Tony