On Sonntag, 20. Dezember 2015 04:21:29 CEST, Kevin Kofler wrote:
The kdewin team should just point people to a flex.exe that produces files that work with the bitrotten C compiler included with Visual C++.
So we only need somebody who forks the hardly maintained flex/yacc tools for windows... It should be simpler to point windows users to a recent MSVC (2015), gcc, clang, or icc (ie. mandate them for KF5, raising the bar from Qt5) We could then indeed raise to -c99 and "guarantee" compilation only for compatible compilers (while older MSVC *may* still work) I'd say it's up to the kdewin people to state their preferences here - require bison and switch to c++ in the flex/yacc toolchain - (soft)require a c99 compliant compiler (where MSVC 2013 *may* still work)
Another, more practical, reason is that if a bug (maybe a security issue) affecting the generated output is fixed in Flex, the pre-generated files would not pick up the fix.
Actually, that rather supports shipping pre-generated code (given the apparent support situation of flex/yacc on windows - windows users could encounter flex bugs none of us ever sees and the backtraces make no sense...) Cheers, Thomas