This package contains the GNU Bison parser generator.

Here are basic installation instructions for a repository checkout:

$ git submodule update --init
$ ./bootstrap

then proceed with the usual configure && make steps.

The file README-hacking.md contains all the needed information about building, modifying and checking Bison.

See the file INSTALL for generic compilation and installation instructions.

Bison requires GNU m4 1.4.6 or later. See https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.6.tar.gz.

As an experimental feature, diagnostics are now colored, controlled by the --color and --style options.

To use them, install the libtextstyle library before configuring Bison. It is available from https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gettext/, for instance https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gettext/libtextstyle-0.8.tar.gz.

The option --color supports the following arguments:

• always, yes: Enable colors.
• never, no: Disable colors.
• auto, tty (default): Enable colors if the output device is a tty.

To customize the styles, create a CSS file, say bison-bw.css, similar to

/* bison-bw.css */
.warning   { }
.error     { font-weight: 800; text-decoration: underline; }
.note      { }

then invoke bison with --style=bison-bw.css, or set the BISON_STYLE environment variable to bison-bw.css.

If you pass --enable-relocatable to configure, Bison is relocatable.

A relocatable program can be moved or copied to a different location on the file system. It can also be used through mount points for network sharing. It is possible to make symlinks to the installed and moved programs, and invoke them through the symlink.

See "Enabling Relocatability" in the documentation.

Bison supports two catalogs: one for Bison itself (i.e., for the maintainer-side parser generation), and one for the generated parsers (i.e., for the user-side parser execution). The requirements between both differ: bison needs ngettext, the generated parsers do not. To simplify the build system, neither are installed if ngettext is not supported, even if generated parsers could have been localized. See http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bison/2009-08/msg00006.html for more details.

See the section FAQ in the documentation (doc/bison.info) for frequently asked questions. The documentation is also available in PDF and HTML, provided you have a recent version of Texinfo installed: run make pdf or make html.

If you have questions about using Bison and the documentation does not answer them, please send mail to help-bison@gnu.org.

Please send bug reports to bug-bison@gnu.org. Be sure to include the version number from bison --version, and a complete, self-contained test case in each bug report.

For any copyright year range specified as YYYY-ZZZZ in this package, note that the range specifies every single year in that closed interval.