Quoting "Michael A. Peters" <mpeters mac com>:
An interest in them does not need to exist, though it helps. I for one am very happy when maintainers of code want to maintain their packages in Extras - I think it has better odds of quality packaging for those who are interested in it.
Cool. I always ship the spec files with my tarballs, so making it Fedora Extras friendly makes it even better.
With respect to reentrat flex - packaging it in /usr/local is not an option. Hopefully a solution can be found that meets the packaging guidelines. Renaming the conflicting files to something else *might* be a workable solution - I'm assuming you can specify which flex you want in the Makefile. I don't know if that's the best solution.
Yeah, that's a possibility as well and it should be all that hard (the /usr/local hack was a quick fix in my own little world :-). Basically, when you use flex to generate the scanner and later link against -lfl (or -lfl<whatever>), the package build system would pick the correct one. If you have a naming convention in mind, I can attempt building the package. Just append -reentrant to everything?
Is it impossible to use standard flex?
Unfortunately not. The mod_spin module works with Apache 2.x, which these days can be a multi-threaded beast (e.g. worker MPM). As such, using a scanner that isn't thread safe would impose performance penalties due to locking requirements and it would also unnecessarily complicate the code (i.e. more bugs), for both of which there is a simple solution - reentrant scanner.
-- Bojan