1flex NEWS 2 3* Noteworthy changes in release 2.6.4 (2017-05-06) [stable] 4 5** build 6 7*** The indent target now knows about flex's new (as of 2.6.0) 8 layout. The indent rules it would apply are not correct and do 9 need to be fixed. 10 11*** The files included in the flex distribution are now built by the 12 version of flex that is included in the distribution. 13 14*** The configure script has a better idea of which headers are 15 required to build flex. It will also error when missing functions 16 are detected. 17 18*** We have lowered the versions of automake and gettext that 19 configure.ac lists as required for building flex. In autogen.sh, 20 we now check for how to call libtoolize and use what we find in 21 the rest of the script. 22 23*** Since files in lib/ are picked up as needed by src/, we no longer 24 generate a Makefile for that directory. 25 26*** Flex can be cross compiled. 27 28** documentation 29 30*** Some typos were removed from the manual. 31 32** scanner 33 34*** Some minor performance enhancements. 35 36*** We honor user defined yy_* macros again. We are also more careful 37 to not leak macro definitions into header files. 38 39*** A number of portability fixes were introduced so building flex is 40 more reliable on more platforms. Additionally, outdated function 41 calls were removed. 42 43*** When building the flex executable itself, %# comments from 44 flex.skl are removed when generating the C source code array. This 45 reduces the size of flex. 46 47** test suite 48 49*** All scripts in the test suite are now run by $(SHELL) and the 50 needed portability fixes have been included. 51 52*** Test suite dependencies are handled much better. This only matters 53 if you are actively developing flex or its test suite. 54 55*** Tests that depend on platform dependent features now properly skip 56 when those platforms are not present. 57 58*** When running "make check", you can now pas V=0 to silence more of 59 the build. This is useful when you're less connncerned about the 60 details of building and linking the test programs themselves. 61 62* Noteworthy changes in release 2.6.3 (2016-12-30) [stable] 63 64** scanner 65 66*** several bug fixes resolved problems introduced in recent flex 67 versions regarding processing of comments, literals and various 68 quoting scenarios. 69 70*** If the path to m4 was sufficiently long, a buffer overflow could 71 occur. This has been resolved. The fix also removes dependence on 72 the constant PATH_MAX. 73 74** build 75 76*** A new configure option --disable-bootstrap changes the behavior of 77 the build system when building flex. The default 78 "--enable-bootstrap" behavior is to build flex, then to use that 79 flex to build flex again. With --disable-bootstrap, the scanner is 80 simply built by sedding the scanner source. This is friendlier to 81 cross compilation. 82 83*** The compatibility functions in lib/ are no longer built as a 84 library. Instead, they are built as $(LIBOBJ) objects. This is 85 simpler and friendlier to cross compilation. 86 87*** It is now possible to build flex without building the accompanying 88 libfl. This is friendlier to cross compilation. See the 89 --disable-libfl option to configure. Resolves #99. 90 91*** the PIC version of libfl was not correctly built. It is no longer 92 included in the build/installation targets of flex since it was 93 unused. 94 95*** the distributed man page is only rebuilt when the relevant source 96 files change or when the binary doesn't exist. In particular, this 97 is friendlier to cross compilation. Resolves #108 98 99** test 100 101*** the shell scripts in the test suite are more portable across different shell implementations. 102 103* version 2.6.2 released 2016-10-24 104 105** flex internals 106 107*** a segfalt involving yyrestart(NULL) has been fixed 108 109*** flex should now handle quoting when mixed with m4 processing correctly 110 111*** flex handles `[[' and `]]' correctly 112 113*** flex no longer generates non-ANSI code 114 115*** more compilation warnings were squashed in generated scanners 116 117*** prevented a buffer overflow that could occur when input buffers were the exact wrong size 118 119** test suite 120 121*** input filenames on MSWindows are now calculated correctly 122 123*** general code cleanups in a number of tests now make the test suite compile much more cleanly 124 125** build system 126 127*** the xz archive has been replaced with an lzip archive 128 129*** a new option to configure --enable-warnings to encapsulate passing 130 of warning-related flags which is useful in testing flex 131 132*** make indent now works for out of source builds 133 134*** Portability warnings when generating Makefile.in files are now suppressed; they were just noise and the use of GNU extensions in Makefile.{am,in,} was intentional and well known. 135 136** bugs 137 138*** resolved gh#67 139 140** new sv translation from the translation project 141 142* version 2.6.1 released 2016-03-01 143 144** flex resources 145 146*** The flex project is now hosted at github. Consider this a "period of transition". In particular, you should start at https://github.com/westes/flex for the flex codebase, issue tracking and pull requests. 147 148*** New releases of flex are to be found at https://github.com/westes/flex/releases. 149 150** flex internals 151 152*** Flex now uses more modern and more standard names for variable types. There's more work to be done on that front yet, though. 153 154*** A number of compiler warnings have been remedied. 155 156*** Line directives should now work as expected and be absent when that is expected. 157 158** test suite 159 160*** When running the test suite, c++ files are compiled with the c++ header inside the flex distribution, rather than relying on the build system's flex header , which might not be installed yet or which might be out of date with respect to what flex tests expect. 161 162*** Some portability fixes in the test suite such as opening files for reading in binary mode 163 164** Building flex 165 166*** The file src/scan.c asdistributed with flex source is now built with the current version of flex. Occasionally this had to be done manually to pick up new flex features. It's now just a part of flex's build system. 167 168*** The pdf version of the manual is no longer distributed with flex, although if you have the texinfo package installed, you can still build it. 169 170*** lots of general build system cleanup 171 172*** the build system tries a bit harder to find libtoolize and texi2dvi. 173 174*** When help2man and texi2dvi are missing, the error messages are now much more helpful. 175 176** bug fixes 177 178*** resolved github issues #53, #54, #55, #61. 179 180*** Resolved sf bugs #128, #129, #155, #160, #184, #187, #195. 181 182* version 2.6.0 released 2015-11-17 183 184** User Visible Changes 185 186*** C++ scanners now use references instead of pointers. See the manual for details. 187 188*** A number of compiler warnings were addressed, so flex generated scanners should be quieter under compiler warning scenarios. 189 190*** Allow error reporting routines to accept varying number of arguments 191 192*** Removed deprecated 'register' storage class specifier 193 194*** Changeed output formats from octal to hexadecimal 195 196*** check limits before using array index cclp; resolves sf-166 197 198*** Suppress clang warning about empty @param paragraph; resolves sf#158 199 200*** Fixed malloc/realloc replacement, resolves sf bug#151. 201 202*** Adjusted buffer sizes on ia64. 203 204*** various documentation and code clean up fixes: resolves sf bugs #167, #168, among other patches. 205 206** Flex Internals 207 208*** flex is now organized into subdirectories. This keeps the tree neater at the top level and puts like things near each other and unlike things away from each other. 209 210*** The test suite has been reorganized and is now run with the parallel test suite harness from automake. 211 212*** Cleaned up the automake parts of the build system to better reflect what automake does on its own. Also added a call to libtoolize in autogen.sh because autoreconf gets confused without a prior run of libtoolize. 213 214*** po/Makefile now includes a rule to fetch the latest translations from the translation project. "make -f po/Makefile getpo" from the top level of the flex tree will fetch the files. 215 216*** New da translation from the translation project 217 218* flex version 2.5.39 released 2014-03-26 219 220** no user visible changes in this release 221 222* version 2.5.38 released 2014-02-14 223 224** internationalization 225 226*** add sr translation from the translation project 227 228*** update da, es, ko, nl, pt_BR, ro, ru, sv, tr, vi, zh_CN translations from the translation project 229 230*** rename zh_tw to its proper zh_TW name 231 232* version 2.5.37 released 2012-08-03 233 234** Import flex into git. See 235 git://flex.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/flex/flex. 236 237** Fix make install target to not fail when the flex++ program is 238 already installed 239 240** New translations from the translation project: de, fi, pl, vi 241 242* version 2.5.36 released 2012-07-20 243 244** various portability fixes that quiet compiler warnings on 64-bit 245 hosts 246 247** various manual fixes, including correcting the name of a %option and 248 updating some simple examples to use ANSI C syntax 249 250** various bug fixes that prevent certain error conditions from 251 persisting when they should not persist 252 253** improvements to the test suite so it behaves better when linking 254 compiled files 255 256** new translations from the translation project: ca, da, es, fi, fr, 257 ga, ko, pt_br, ro, ru, sv, tr, zh_cn 258 259** the flex distribution is now built with automake 1.10.1 and automake 260 2.61 261 262* version 2.5.35 released 2008-02-26 263 264** fixed bug that prevented flex from accepting certain comments in the 265 scanner file (resolves bugs #1849809 and #1849805) 266 267** fix bug that prevented headers for all functions from being generated 268 (resolves bug #1628314) 269 270** change yy_size_t to be size_t (resolves bug #1849812) 271 272** new de, nl, pl, pt_br, vi translations from the translation project 273 274* version 2.5.34 released 2007-12-12 275 276** introduce yylex_init_extra; see the manual for details 277 278** introduce %option extra-type="your_type *" (resolves bug #1744505) 279 280** The flex program now parses multiple short concatenated options (resolves bug 281 #1619820). Thanks to Petr Machata of Red Hat on this issue. 282 283** better checking after yyalloc/yyrealloc (resolves bug #1595967) 284 285** flex now provides for a libfl_pic.a compiled with position 286 independent code. Particularly useful when including a flex scanner 287 in a shared library and with more recent versions of gcc. Thanks to the Debian project for the idea. 288 289** SourceForge feature request #1658379: Expose YY_BUF_SIZE in the 290 header file. 291 292** flex better escapes filenames with special characters in them 293 (resolves bug #1623600) 294 295** a memory leak was plugged(resolves bug #1601111) 296 297** pattern language expanded; see the manual for details on the below 298 highlights 299 300*** pattern options added to specify patterns as case-insensitive or 301 case-sensitive 302 303*** pattern options to specify whether the "." character should match 304 the newline character 305 306*** pattern options added to allow ignoring of whitespace in patterns 307 308*** POSIX character classes may be negated in patterns 309 310*** patterns may now use set difference, union operators 311 312** the manual now contains an appendix listing various common patterns 313 which may be useful when writing scanners 314 315** some memory leaks were removed from the C++ scanner (but the C++ 316 scanner is still experimental and may change radically without 317 notice) 318 319** c++ scanners can now use yywrap 320 321** added new unit test for c++ and yywrap 322 323** portability fixes to some unit tests 324 325** flex man page and flex manual in pdf now distributed in the flex 326distribution 327 328** new ca, vi, ga, nl translations from the translation project 329 330** flex no longer comes with an rpm spec file 331 332** flex development now happens with automake 1.9.6 333 334* version 2.5.33 released 2006-2-20 335 336** all flex resources are now to be found from the website at 337 http://flex.sourceforge.net/ 338 339** there was no release 2.5.32 published 340 341** numerous bug and security fixes 342 343** new nl, vi, sv, ro, po, ga, ca, fr, tr translations from the translation project 344 345** upgrade to use gettext 0.12 (this now makes the "pdf" and "ps" 346 targets in the build system able to be run successfully) 347 348* version 2.5.31 released 2003-4-1 349 350** remove --enable-maintainer-mode configure option; none of the 351 Makefiles were using it and it can be unduely confusing 352 353* version 2.5.30 released 2003-4-1 354 355** yylineno is per-buffer in reentrant scanners 356 357** added %top directive for placing code at the top of the generated 358 scanner; see manual for details 359 360** flex now uses m4 to generate scanners; while this means that 361 scanners are more readable, it means that flex requires m4 to be 362 installed; see manual for details 363 364* version 2.5.29 released 2003-3-5 365 366** Automatic stack management for multiple input buffers in C and C++ scanners 367 368** moved the flex documentation to a new doc/ subdirectory 369 370** cleanups to the yy namespace 371 372* version 2.5.28 released 2003-2-12 373 374** flex is now hosted at sourceforge 375 376** Fixed trailing slash bug in YY_INPUT macro def 377 378** Flex now warns if always-interactive is specified with fast or full 379 380* version 2.5.27 released 2003-1-21 381 382** flex now works with recent bison versions 383 384** new pt_br translation from the translation project 385 386* version 2.5.26 released 2003-1-14 387 388** Fixed table deserialization bug on big-endian archs. Patch sent from Bryce Nichols <bryce@bnichols.org> 389 390** yyleng has proper declarations now; this caused flex to generate 391 unusable scanners for some programs 392 393** the flex distribution now includes a spec file suitable for use 394 with rpm 395 396** some more c++ fixes 397 398** new es translation from the translation project 399 400** slight tweeks to the flex_int*_t types 401 402** flex now warns about pattern ranges that might be ambiguous when 403 generating a case-insensitive scanner 404 405 406* version 2.5.25 released 2002-12-2 407 408** flex now uses flex_int*_t types. For C99 systems, they are just the 409 int*_t types; for non-C99 systems, we just make some typedefs 410 411** new pt_br translation from the translation project 412 413* version 2.5.24 released 2002-11-25 414 415* more portability fixes 416 417** the manual continues to be updated and edited, but it's still got a 418 ways to go 419 420** it is possible to have multiple c++ scanners in the same program again 421 422** new turkish translation from the translation project 423 424* version 2.5.23 released 2002-10-21 425 426** more portability fixes 427 428** the manual includes a title page and a table-of-contents when printed 429 430** the test suite can be run with "make check" from the top-level 431 directory 432 433** configure now accepts the --enable-maintainer-mode option 434 435** gettext functionality is now only available externally 436 437** the constant FLEX_BETA is defined if flex is a beta release 438 439** the script create-test was not included in the distribution and it 440 should have been 441 442* version 2.5.22 released 2002-10-10 443 444** more portability fixes around how we get ahold of the integral 445 types; there is a constant FLEX_NEED_INTEGRAL_TYPE_DEFINITIONS 446 which you should define if you don't have the <inttypes.h> header 447 file (after you complain to your C vendor for not providing a 448 reasonable C environment) 449 450** more test suite cleanups; in particular, the test suite should run 451 correctly when build from a different directory 452 453** upgraded automake to 1.7 and consequently autoconf to 2.54; this 454 means, among other things, that there is some support for 455formatting the manual in postscript and pdf in the distributed 456 Makefile.in (and therefore in the Makefile built by configure) 457 458** the flex.1 manpage is generated by help2man; (this has been true 459 for quite a while but was not listed here) 460 461** flex now includes three defined constants to indicate which version 462 of flex generated a scanner (YY_FLEX_{MAJOR,MINOR,SUBMINOR}_VERSION) 463 464** flex tries its best to output only the relevant portions of the 465 skeleton when generating a scanner, thus avoiding as much 466 conditional compilation as possible 467 468* version 2.5.21 released 2002-9-17 469 470** one of the tests in the test suite broke the dist target 471 472* version 2.5.20 released 2002-9-16 473 474** A flex scanner has the ability to save the DFA tables to a file, 475 and load them at runtime when needed; see the manual for details 476 477** Added %option bison-bridge (--bison-bridge) 478 479** Removed %option reentrant-bison/--reentrant-bison/-Rb 480 481** yylineno is present in all scanners; Modified nasty performance 482 penalty warning with yylineno in documentation 483 484** test-table-opts is now run last in the test suite because it's so fat 485 486** flex can, to some extent, diagnose where internal problems occur 487 488** new translations from the translation project: fr, ca, de, ru, sv 489 490**Flex generates C99 defs now; see YY_TRADITIONAL_FUNC_DEFS in the 491 manual if that's not a good thing for you 492 493* version 2.5.19 released 2002-9-5 494 495** prevent segfault on input lines which are longer than the allocated 496 space (problem report from Manoj Srivastava 497 <srivasta@golden-gryphon.com>) 498 499** Changed option 'header' to 'header-file' 500 501* version 2.5.18 released 2002-9-4 502 503** portability fixes for integer constants and in the way the test 504 suite reports its results 505 506** the test for bison was reporting bison missing when it was, in 507 fact, found 508 509** if we don't find GNU indent, we're more careful when we're not 510 finding it 511 512* version 2.5.17 released 2002-8-29 513 514** more portability fixes 515 516** updated config.sub and config.guess 517 518** flex is indented by GNU indent (this was done earlier but not 519 explicitly documented) 520 521* version 2.5.16 released 2002-8-28 522 523** c++ scanners compile again 524 525** there is now an indent target in the top-level Makefile; configure 526 checks for GNU indent which is required for proper operation of the 527 indent target 528 529** some more portability fixes were made 530 531** %options and invocation sections of manual merged 532 533** a c++ test was added to the test suite 534 535** we're trying to clean up more files in the test suite's make clean 536 targets 537 538* version 2.5.15 released 2002-8-21 539 540** reject-state buffer is now dynamically allocated and REJECT buffer 541 variables are reentrant-safe 542 543** manual now discusses memory usage 544 545** skeleton now processed by m4 before mkskel.sh; (this only matters 546 if you want to change the skeleton or if you're doing flex development) 547 548** zh_cn translation added from translation project 549 550** a bug that caused a segfault has now been fixed 551 552** the test suite now respects the usual CFLAGS, etc. variables 553 554** removed some warnings which some tests trigggered with the -s option 555 556** the flex-generated header file now tries to be smarter about 557 conditionally including start conditions 558 559** tables code omitted from generated scanner when not used 560 561* version 2.5.14 released 2002-8-15 562 563** the tests using the reentrant c scanner as c++ were reworked 564 slightly to be sure that the c++ was enforced 565 566** de translation now included in the distribution 567 568** various portability fixes regarding nls support, c++ include 569 headers, etc. 570 571* version 2.5.13 released 2002-8-15 572 573** the header file output with %option header is now much smaller 574 575** Fixed type mismatch in printf in scanner skeleton 576 577** yylex_init now reports errors 578 579* version 2.5.12 released 2002-8-8 580 581** updated gettext support to 0.11.5 582 583** new fr translation from the translation project 584 585** bison is no longer needed to build flex; If you are building flex 586 from a release (i.e., not from a cvs snapshot), then you don't need 587 to have a pre-built lex around either (unless you modify scan.l, of 588 course); (This has been true for some time, but was not mentioned 589 here.) 590 591* version 2.5.11 released 2002-7-31 592 593** Fixed bug where yyless did not consider yylineno 594 595** the yylineno performance hit is now gone 596 597** fixed some typos in the manual and we now include texinfo.tex in 598 the distribution 599 600** traditional prototypes output for C scanners, controlled by a 601 preprocessor symbol; see documentation for details 602 603* version 2.5.10 released 2002-7-24 604 605** yy_globals renamed to yyscanner and yy_globals_t renamed to 606 yy_guts_t 607 608** added dist-bzip2 option to Makefile.am so we now produce a bzip2'd 609 archive in addition to the standard gzip archive 610 611* version 2.5.9 612 613** new tests in test suite: test-mem-{nr,r}, test-posix, 614 test-posixly-correct, test-debug-{nr,r} 615 616** made changes to work with gcc-3.2 development code 617 618** ability to choose which memory functions are used in flex 619 620** new yylex_destroy() function for the non-reentrant scanner 621 622** new handling of POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable 623 624** the test suite now has its copyrights explicitly described 625 626** new ca, de, fr, ru, sv, tr translations 627 628* version 2.5.8 629 630** a new --posix option generates scanners with posix-style abc{1,3} 631 compatible parsing, see manual for the screwy details 632 633* version 2.5.7 634 635** configure.in now includes a call to AC_PREREQ to enforce the 636 requirement for autoconf at least 2.50 (This only effects you if 637 you're doing flex development.) 638 639** configure now uses autoconf's versioning information and configure 640 --help reports the bug-reporting address for flex 641 642** test suite now only reports success versus failure; reporting 643 skipped is problematic under the current setup 644 645** compilation with --disable-nls now works 646 647** flex can now be built in a separate directory 648 649* version 2.5.6 650 651** gettext support added (from gettext 0.11) 652 653*** translations for ca, da, de, es, fr, ko, ru, sv, tr included 654 655** distribution now built under automake 1.6 and autoconf 2.53 656 657** command-line option parsing happens differently now: 658 659*** Added long option parsing 660 661*** Options -n and -c, previously deprecated, now simply do nothing 662 663*** Options are now parsed left to right 664 665** added a number of new options 666 667*** All positive %options are now accessible from the command line 668 669*** Added option -D, to define a preprocessor symbol 670 671*** Added option --header=FILE to specify a C .h file to generate 672 673*** added option --yywrap to call yywrap on EOF 674 675*** added option --yylineno to track line count in yylineno 676 677*** --yyclass=NAME name of C++ class when generating c++ scanners 678 679*** for long option names which are associated with existing short 680options, see accompanying documentation 681 682*** new %option nounistd or command-line --nounistd added to prevent 683 flex from generating #include <unistd.h> on systems that don't 684 have that include file 685 686** Support for reentrant C scanners has been added 687 688*** Updated the manual with the new reentrant API 689 690*** Two new options %option reentrant (-R) and 691%option reentrant-bison (-Rb) 692 693*** All globals optionally placed into struct yyglobals_t 694 695*** All access to globals replaced by macro invocations 696 697*** All functions optionally take one additional 698argument, yy_globals 699 700*** New style for invoking reentrant scanner: 701yylex_init(void** scanner ); 702yylex( scanner ); 703yylex_destroy( scanner ); 704 705*** Added get/set functions for members of struct yy_globals_t 706e.g., yyget_text, yyget_leng, etc 707 708*** Prefix substitution added for new functions 709 710*** Macro shortcuts to the lengthy get/set functions 711provided for use in actions, e.g., yytext, yyleng, etc 712 713*** Arbitrary, user-defined data, "yyextra", may be added to scanner 714 715** %option nomain no longer implies %option yywrap 716But the inverse is still true 717 718** Developer test suite added 719 720*** TESTS/ directory has been added. Users can 721'make test' in the TESTS directory to execute the test suite 722 723** Support for bison variables yylval and yylloc added 724 725** automake support for the build process 726 727** manual is now in texinfo/info format 728 729*** flex.1 removed from distribution 730 731** flex no longer generates C-language scanners with C++-style 732 comments 733 734** flex now generates scanners in c++ which are compatible with 735 recent c++ compilers 736 737** flex input scanner now recognizes '\r' as an EOL character 738 739See the file ONEWS for changes in earlier releases. 740 741See the file COPYING for copying conditions. 742 743Local Variables: 744mode: text 745mode: outline-minor 746end: 747