Gabor Szabo wrote:
Side track
I tried to build wireshark after checking out from SVN.
Both autogen.sh and configure seemed to report success but then
make - after some work - failed with:
Neither lex nor flex was found
After installing flex and running configure again, make now goes on...
configure might need to stop and report error if neither of those are found
There are at least three reasons to build a package from source:
1) no binary package for your platform exists;
2) you want to look at the source first, and make sure the binaries are
built from that source;
3) you want to make changes to the source.
In case 1), we want to minimize the number of tools required to build
the application, as users in that category might not have a system with
the full panoply of tools that *might* be needed to build software. In
particular, they might not have Flex or Lex.
Thus, we don't require Flex - the distribution tarball comes with the
files generated by Flex. This may inconvenience developers, but at
least it doesn't inconvenience non-developers.
It may be that binary packages are sufficiently widely available that we
don't have to worry about this, although there might be some platforms
for which there's a significant delay between a new Wireshark release
and the availability of binary packages.
If somebody can suggest a way to have the configure script in the
release tarballs not fail if neither Flex nor Lex were found (actually,
we don't support Lex, so we only care about Flex), but have the
configure script you get if you're building from SVN or an SVN tarball
fail if Flex isn't found, that would be nice - I'm not sure there is a
good one, however.