Version 3.8.2-1 is the first release of GNU bison.

The xPack GNU bison is a standalone cross-platform binary distribution of GNU bison.

There are separate binaries for macOS (Intel 64-bit, Apple Silicon 64-bit) and GNU/Linux (Intel 64-bit, Arm 32/64-bit).

Download

The binary files are available from GitHub Releases.

Prerequisites

  • GNU/Linux Intel 64-bit: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • GNU/Linux Arm 32/64-bit: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • Intel macOS 64-bit: 10.13 or later
  • Apple Silicon macOS 64-bit: 11.6 or later

Install

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

Easy install

The easiest way to install GNU bison is with xpm by using the binary xPack, available as @xpack-dev-tools/bison from the npmjs.com registry.

With the xpm tool available, installing the latest version of the package and adding it as a development dependency for a project is quite easy:

cd my-project
xpm init # Add a package.json if not already present

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/bison@latest --verbose

ls -l xpacks/.bin

To install this specific version, use:

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/bison@3.8.2-1.1 --verbose

It is also possible to install Meson Build globally, in the user home folder, but this requires xPack aware tools to automatically identify them and manage paths.

xpm install --global @xpack-dev-tools/bison@latest --verbose

Uninstall

To remove the links created by xpm in the current project:

cd my-project

xpm uninstall @xpack-dev-tools/bison

To completely remove the package from the central xPack store:

xpm uninstall --global @xpack-dev-tools/bison

Compliance

The xPack GNU bison generally follows the official GNU bison releases.

The current version is based on:

  • GNU bison version 3.8.2 from 2021-09-25.

Changes

Compared to the upstream version, there are no functional changes.

Bug fixes

  • none

Enhancements

  • none

Known problems

  • none

Shared libraries

On all platforms the packages are standalone, and expect only the standard runtime to be present on the host.

All dependencies that are build as shared libraries are copied locally in the libexec folder (or in the same folder as the executable for Windows).

DT_RPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH

On GNU/Linux the binaries are adjusted to use a relative path:

$ readelf -d library.so | grep runpath
 0x000000000000001d (RPATH)            Library rpath: [$ORIGIN]

In the GNU ld.so search strategy, the DT_RPATH has the highest priority, higher than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, so if this later one is set in the environment, it should not interfere with the xPack binaries.

Please note that previous versions, up to mid-2020, used DT_RUNPATH, which has a priority lower than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and does not tolerate setting it in the environment.

@rpath and @loader_path

Similarly, on macOS, the binaries are adjusted with install_name_tool to use a relative path.

Documentation

The original documentation is available online.

Build

The binaries for all supported platforms (Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux) were built using the xPack Build Box (XBB), a set of build environments based on slightly older distributions, that should be compatible with most recent systems.

For the prerequisites and more details on the build procedure, please see the How to build page.

CI tests

Before publishing, a set of simple tests were performed on an exhaustive set of platforms. The results are available from:

Tests

TBD

Checksums

The SHA-256 hashes for the files are:

e46dd1b8ae40125c7180470fccddde121ebf219e7cd27a3b7c118d2815247a3c
xpack-bison-3.8.2-1-darwin-arm64.tar.gz

d45064315fa2612817979399ac11532ffe68c4786fa664ed6655b233e8bc818b
xpack-bison-3.8.2-1-darwin-x64.tar.gz

b094cf6591d137ba5de81305f4e841c894ad5a2e2aa01447491e3bc82e1624c6
xpack-bison-3.8.2-1-linux-arm.tar.gz

907ff696b73a01d1224ac193c9e1a966bf53336eb3e7bc7dee459ea9e086284f
xpack-bison-3.8.2-1-linux-arm64.tar.gz

543bc8f31c05713c5506c1a7dfa4fe81e57dec3cc41c243a47a08e4defd6100d
xpack-bison-3.8.2-1-linux-x64.tar.gz

Deprecation notices

32-bit support

Support for 32-bit Intel Linux and Intel Windows was dropped in 2022. Support for 32-bit Arm Linux (armv7l) will be preserved for a while, due to the large user base of 32-bit Raspberry Pi systems.

Linux minimum requirements

Support for RedHat 7 was dropped in 2022 and the minimum requirement was raised to GLIBC 2.27, available starting with Ubuntu 18, Debian 10 and RedHat 8.

Pre-deprecation notice for Ubuntu 18.04

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver reached the end of the standard five-year maintenance window for Long-Term Support (LTS) release on 31 May 2023.

As a courtesy, the xPack GNU/Linux releases will continue to be based on Ubuntu 18.04 for another year.

From mid-2024 onwards, the GNU/Linux binaries will be built on Debian 10, (GLIBC 2.28), and are also expected to run on RedHat 8.

Users are urged to update their build and test infrastructure to ensure a smooth transition to the next xPack releases.

Download analytics

Credit to Shields IO for the badges and to Somsubhra/github-release-stats for the individual file counters.