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Getting Started with xPack GNU bison

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Overview​

xPack GNU bison is a standalone cross-platform (GNU/Linux, macOS) binary distribution of GNU bison, intended for reproducible builds.

GNU bison is a general-purpose parser generator that converts an annotated context-free grammar into a deterministic LR or generalized LR (GLR) parser employing LALR parser tables.

GNU bison is an open source project hosted on Savannah.

The open source xPack GNU bison project is hosted on GitHub as xpack-dev-tools/bison-xpack; it provides the platform specific binaries as release assets.

In addition to the binary archives and the package metadata, this project also includes the build scripts.

Features​

All binaries are:

  • self-contained (include all required libraries)
  • file-system relocatable (can be installed in any location)
  • built on slightly older systems (to make them run on both old and new systems)
Compatibility with older systems

Given that most operating systems maintain significant compatibility with older versions, building an application on an older system ensures that the same binary can run on newer versions. Conversely, building an application on a newer system may utilize library features that are not available in older versions, making backward compatibility less feasible.

Benefits​

The main advantages of using the xPack GNU bison are:

  • a convenient, uniform and portable install/uninstall/upgrade procedure; the same procedure is used for all major platforms (x64 GNU/Linux, arm64 GNU/Linux, arm GNU/Linux, x64 macOS, arm64 macOS)
  • multiple versions of the same package can be installed at the same time on the same system
  • no need to worry about dependent libraries, all are included
  • significantly lighter and easier to use than Docker images that provide similar functionality and are GNU/Linux centric
  • projects can be tied to specific tools versions; this provides a good reproducibility, especially useful in CI/CD environments.

Compatibility​

The xPack GNU bison project is fully compatible with the upstream GNU bison.

Install​

The binaries can be installed automatically as binary xPacks or manually as portable archives.

The details of installing the xPack GNU bison on various platforms are presented in the Install Guide.

Documentation​

The original GNU bison documentation is available from the project web site:

Release schedule​

This distribution generally follows the official GNU bison releases, which are very rare.

Support & feedback​

The quick advice for getting support and providing feedback is to use the GitHub Discussions.

For additional information, please refer to the Help Centre page.

Change log​

The release and change log is available in the repository CHANGELOG.md file.

Maintainer & Developer information​

For information on the workflow used to make releases, please see the Maintainer Info page.

For information on how to build the binaries, please see the Developer Info page.

However, the ultimate source for details are the build scripts themselves, all available from the bison-xpack.git/build-assets/scripts folder. The scripts include common code from the @xpack-dev-tools/xbb-helper package.

License​

Unless otherwise stated, the original content is released under the terms of the MIT License, with all rights reserved to Liviu Ionescu.

The binary distributions include several open-source components; the corresponding licenses are available in each archive in the distro-info/licenses folder.

Releases​

The list of releases is available in the Releases pages.