Bump bison baseline?

[Christian Lohmaier]

Hi *,

On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 8:49 AM Ilmari Lauhakangas
<ilmari.lauhakangas at libreoffice.org> wrote:
> On 7/21/25 08:37, Mike Kaganski wrote:
> > Our builds emit these warnings:
> > […]
> > According to https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bison/2019-06/
> > msg00013.html , we better use `%define api.pure full`, available since
> > bison 2.7.
> >
> > Our configure requires at least version 2.0 ( https://
> > opengrok.libreoffice.org/xref/core/configure.ac?
> > r=e4b24dba07c54c1957df8c42a19392bd01fc01e2#12230 ), which seems quite
> > old now.

FYI: our current almalinux8 linux baseline has 3.0.4 already

> > Would bumping bison baseline, and replacing the problematic
> > instruction,be OK at this time?

No strong feelings about bison, especially not at the moment since I
didn't look how annoying it would be to compile that on macOS – some
stuff is easy, some other stuff requires you to go down a rabbit hole
of further deps. But I cannot imagine bison being that bad.

> I have studied this before and the problem is macOS, which comes with
> bison 2.3. See, for example,
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10778905/why-does-my-mac-os-x-10-7-3-have-an-old-version-2-3-of-gnu-bison
>
> I don't know, if we should ship our own bison for macOS in LODE, then.

I think we should think about sunsetting the lode method, and instead
integrate that into the core repository.
For meson I added it as an external since that just needs to be
unpacked to be usable, but for utilities that take time to compile
there could be a "make systemdeps INSTALLPREFIX=~/deps/bin" target or
similar

Or if it is dependency-chain-hell we can also go the precompiled route
like for pkgconf for windows or for make..

ciao
Christian