Subject: [bug#59991] [PATCH 0/2] Port tests to modern C

From: Sam James <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2022 23:05:56 +0000

> On 12 Dec 2022, at 22:57, Karl Berry <[email-masked]> wrote:
>    Another patch dedicated to Flex related tests will follow.
> 
> Just wondering again, is an upstream flex still actively maintained by
> anyone, anywhere?  Looks like https://github.com/westes/flex was touched
> 6 months ago, so that's good, but there hasn't been a release for over
> five years.
> 

I've started investigating using reflex (https://invisible-island.net/reflex/reflex.html)
for this reason.

There's a long story with how flex broke with glibc-2.26/2.27 or so with reallocrray()
and implicit function declarations and there hasn't been a release to fix that (https://github.com/westes/flex/issues/499)
so all distros have to backport a bunch of patches to fix it:
- https://github.com/westes/flex/commit/4b5111d9772b5c160340ca96f08d30d7f6db5cda
- https://github.com/westes/flex/commit/24fd0551333e7eded87b64dd36062da3df2f6380
- https://github.com/westes/flex/commit/0db9f8903a446e7026874be519b8dc55a471f014
- https://github.com/westes/flex/commit/a17d79e9c722a6735b6d2a8f152287404f27df32
- https://github.com/westes/flex/commit/4081efa0831b15d7e4e4255401c225ad8262426d
- https://github.com/westes/flex/commit/1985bb3c7abed940e91ad816504ef08a18c3b7c1

Note that some of these affect the generated programs. It's possible that some
of these might actually make the automake patch obsolete, although given there's
no flex release definitely on the horizon, it's probably worth at least working around
it in automake.

See also:
- https://github.com/westes/flex/issues/436
- https://bugs.gentoo.org/705800
- https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/04/22/implicit-function-declarations-flexs-use-of-reallocarray

Best,
sam