I just checked this with flex 2.5.31 on my 64-bit Fedora Core 4 desktop, and I get the same problems as on Debian;
I.e., this indeed seems to be a general problem with flex 2.5.31 and our pathfinder lexer code.
hence, unless we can fix our pathfinder lexer code to work properly with flex 2.5.31, we should indeed make configure check for the flex version, and quit once we find flex 2.5.31.
... I won't have time for this before next week ...
Stefan
Check the "Debian3.1" column at http://monetdb.cwi.nl/testing/projects/monetdb/Stable/pathfinder/.mTests103/... or go directly to http://monetdb.cwi.nl/testing/projects/monetdb/Stable/pathfinder/.mTests103/...
With flex 2.5.31 (at least on Debian; the only platform in the TestWebPool that has flex 2.5.31; all others have either flex 2.5.4 or 2.5.33), we get tons of ======== syntax error, unexpected at_StringLiteral on line 1 (next token is 'should work'') parse error: XQuery parsing failed ========
with pathfinder; with flex 2.5.33 these are gone (on Debian).
Admittedly, my "fix" only works for the testweb, and indeed, if this is a flex 2.5.31 problem on other platforms as well, we should rather have configure check for the flex version, and quit in case we find 2.5.31. However, since I don't know, whether this in only a problem with the default flex 2.5.31 on our 64-bit Debian 3.1, I went for this quick hack.
I also did not spend any time on analysing whether we could change our code to work properly with the default flex 2.5.31 on our 64-bit Debian 3.1.
Indeed, only "development folks" that use conf/conf.bash on a Debian system will benefit from my "fix". However, the tarball come with the flex/bison generated C code, hence these tools should not be required for users; and hence, the problem should not occur for users.
Stefan