Wireshark mailing list archives

Should we require Flex with reentrant scanner support?


From: Guy Harris <guy () alum mit edu>
Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2015 20:20:23 -0700

Currently, we require Flex, rather than Lex, but we don't require a version of Flex sufficiently new to support 
reentrant scanners.

That's not a major issue yet, but it could potentially be an issue if we make more use of threading and have two 
threads in the same process

        1) both reading Lucent/Ascend ISDN device text output files;

        2) both reading Tektronix K12 text files;

        3) both importing text files as captures;

as those all involve Flex scanners.  It *might* also come up if any of the other Flex-scanner code is run in more than 
one thread at once.

If we also require a version of Flex that supports --header-file=, it could also let us clean up or even eliminate the 
runlex.sh script, as those versions of Flex can generate a .h files that declares functions.

Flex 2.5.6 (from some time in 2002, I think) adds support for reentrant scanners.  It also supports --header=, which 
was renamed to --header-file in Flex 2.5.19, released 2002-09-05.

We'd also want to require Bison or Berkeley YACC, to generate reentrant parsers, for the Lucent/Ascend ISDN device text 
file reader.
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