If you see this file, it's because you have a cvs snapshot of flex. If
you are not interested in flex development or you are not in need of
the latest bleeding-edge features, then this snapshot is not for you.

When you get a distribution of flex, a large number of intermediate
files needed to make building flex easy are included. You don't have
that in this snapshot.

You will need various external tools in order to build the distribution. Here is
a (possibly incomplete) list of the required tools. Always get the latest
version of each tool:

compiler suite;  e.g., gcc
bash or some other fairly robust sh-style shell
GNU bison;  to generate parse.c from parse.y
GNU m4; required by BNU autoconf (yes, it *must* be GNU m4)
GNU autoconf and GNU automake; for generating Makefiles etc.
GNU gettext; for i18n
flex;  for bootstrap of scan.l
help2man; to generate man page
tar, gzip, etc.; for packaging of the source distribution
texinfo tools;  to build and test the flex manual
perl; GNU automake and GNU autoconf now depend on perl to run

ONce you have all the necessary tools installed, life becomes
simple. To prepare the flex tree for building, run the script:

$ ./autogen.sh

in the top level of the flex source tree.
This script calls the various tools needed to get flex ready for the
GNU-style configure script to be able to work.

From this point on, building flex follows the usual configure, make,
make install routine.