http://invisible-island.net/
Copyright © 2001-2017,2022 by Thomas E. Dickey
This is a collection of some of the patches which I have made to GNU programs. I have submitted these patches to the appropriate maintainers, but received no acknowledgment. That is, they were ignored. In a few other cases, I have seen my changes incorporated without credit, but that is another matter. The former (nonexistent or non-responsive maintainers) are preferable to the latter (egotistical plagiarists). Here's a quote from one of the latter's (not a GNU maintainer) build instructions:
Once again, there should be no errors.
You'll get lots of warnings, just ignore them.
locate when there was too great a change in
lengths between "adjacent" directory names.-exec option does not work.Flex of course is not a part of the GNU project. It is distributed under a modified BSD license. However, many people continue to assume it is GNU software; this page is a convenient place to document this patch (until I add an analogous page for other patches).
flex by repairing some of the damage done by the
"new" flex's moving some of its namespace into
m4 macros.
Flex, as you note here is not a GNU
program.
So-called "new" flex is an orphaned project
here. which has
been packaged in Debian/unstable since 2003. The Debian
package maintainer has been attempting to breath life into it
ever since, although its developers have abandoned it. For
practical purposes, he is the program's maintainer, but does
not have a good grasp of its design. Consequently,
development (other than build-fixes) has stopped.
More interesting, however, is the notion of making
flex depend upon m4. That detracts
from its portability (read the code and think about it). The
immediate problem addressed by this patch is that by making
m4-macros of flex's output, it makes the -P
option rename the yytext and yyleng
variables, rather than provide both the names. That makes it
not comply with POSIX (some mailing list discussion noted via
google a while back hinted that the developers needed some
help there).
/usr/include/bits/string2.h
patch with Visual
C++ and Borland C:Modify to make this work with win32 compilers (Visual C++ and Borland C), by adding module raf.c which sidesteps the non-POSIX use of fseek and ftell to address the patch file by characters.
Make PARAMS() macro consistently defined/used across modules, to allow this to compile with Borland C. (2.5.4's note about converting C sources to ANSI prototypes is misleading).
Make redefinition of const within some C
files only happen if the config.h header is not used.
Fix broken ifdef's for stdarg/varargs in error.c, adding intermediate symbol USE_STDARG which is defined consistently with PARAMS() macro.
Fix several compiler warnings, including most of those where a pointer value was treated as a boolean (not portable because an int is not necessarily as big as a pointer), highlighting a logic error in the use of the 'invc' variable.
I've submitted fixes for screen more than once. That was finally resolved with a new maintainer:
He also accepted fixes to allow screen to
work with the new title control-sequences which I added to
xterm in patch
#251, in
November 2009.
see also my version of autoconf.
I continue to work on flex, distributed as reflex.
I also have improved indent, distributed as cindent.
Copyright © 2001-2017,2022 by Thomas E. Dickey
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