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Re: Standard LEX variable doesn't work in Make.


Am 21.11.2016 um 17:57 schrieb Kaz Kylheku:

I'm changing a FOSS project to rely more on standard Make
vars such as CC and CFLAGS and such: use $(CC) for
the compiler unless told otherwise, incorporate $(CFLAGS)
if it is defined, and so forth. This is friendly toward
distro package maintainers.

Not really. Package maintainers will almost universally expect your source to have some kind of 'configure' script, which would take of this and most other such properties for you.

Anyway, even though my Cygwin installation has GNU Flex,
the lex command is nonexistent; thus the $(LEX) Make
variable fails.

It's not $(LEX) that's failing here; it's the way you form expectations about what $(LEX) is supposed to be. The value of $(LEX) is clearly documented to default to 'lex' (see "info make implicit implicit").

If the installation has some sort of lex, the
predefined $(LEX) variable should resolve to it.

No. LEX is a modifiable variable, for the express purpose that it be set to what the system actually needs. Yes, that means _you_ are supposed to do that (or to set up tools outside make to do it for you).

Morale: Make is not autoconf, nor does it want to be.

One final note: your report is in no way specific to Cygwin, so this is almost certainly the wrong mailing list to send it to.


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