[R-pkg-devel] Flex missing in win-builder

[@@j5xsj9 m@iii@g oii @iiiy@@ddy@io]

Is it possible to get flex in the win-builder windows environment? It's present in the debian environment. My package depends on cmake, bison, and flex. Each of these are listed in the `SystemRequirments` field of my DESCRIPTION file but flex is the only one that cmake can't find.

The win-builder home page (https://win-builder.r-project.org/) doesn't say much about foreign dependencies other than we have what's available in Rtools plus a small list of others. But neither cmake or bison are available by default in Rtools, they both have to be explicitly installed with `pacman`. Flex can also be installed via `pacman`, so why are the other two available?

I can't find much on how the `SystemRequirments` is used in "Writing R Extensions" either, is this used to tell CRAN what is needed to build the package? Or is it just a hint to end users? If the former how are they supposed to be named? Different package managers have different names for the same packages. Does it need to be named `libfl-dev`? (This Rstudio repo: https://github.com/rstudio/r-system-requirements, makes it look like it's just a hint for humans.)

If not able to access flex, I think I can generate the files locally and commit those but I'm pretty sure that will require doing what `rigraph` had to do and get `Make` compile all the external code that is currently handled by various `CMakeLists.txt` which is probably doable but looks like a lot work and requires manually regenerating and commiting flex files whenever updating external dependencies. Any better alternatives?
	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]