On Jun 18, Manoj Srivastava ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > On Mon, 16 Jun 2003 22:55:53 -0400, Neil Roeth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > > On Jun 13, Daniel Jacobowitz ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > >> Certainly you have not broken Debian; but I maintain that this > >> short-sightedness does damage Debian's usefulness as a development > >> platform, for all those targets which many more practical > >> developers must support in order to do their jobs. > > > I think this is an excellent point. I can think of many times when > > I've done development work in Debian and ported the result to > > Solaris, IRIX or HPUX. It is, of course, not a requirement for > > Debian that this be easy, but the easier it is, the more convincing > > the argument for integrating Debian into a mixed *nix environment, > > for everyone from developers to CIOs. > > Fine. You can then still choose to use flex-old (of course, > any C++ scanners you have shall fail to work with gcc 3.3, and even > for C scanners all bets are off wrt new compilers). > > Or you can use the new flex, and get scanners that require > conforming implementations. > > Debian offers you the cjoice -- since there is none which is > unequivocally better.
I was addressing the more general "short-sightedness" point, not the specific flex issue. I suppose I could have stated that explicitly. "[package] works with all 11 architectures that comprise debian" is short sighted if there is significant value to cross platform development, where cross platform means Debian to non-Debian, not Debian arch to other Debian arch. -- Neil Roeth