Re: Unable to build Bison with PGI compilers

[Paul Eggert]

On 01/31/2017 09:04 AM, Stewart, Adam James wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to install Bison 3.0.4 with PGI 16.5, but make crashes with the 
> following error messages:
>
> src/bison-InadequacyList.o: In function `xnmalloc':
> /blues/gpfs/home/software/spack-0.10.0/var/spack/stage/bison-3.0.4-qofkgp3xfpikbq7oj7khyo6sh6mmmmgj/bison-3.0.4/lib/xalloc.h:108:
>  multiple definition of `xnmalloc'

This is the same as the problem you reported against GNU M4 last March. 
PGI by default does not support the C99 'inline' keyword properly. A 
workaround was installed into Gnulib here:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=6c58857620e62135b0b748df436008eb3c3a23d6

This fix should appear in the next Bison version, whenever it comes out. 
In the meantime you can apply the Gnulib patch to your copy of Bison, 
and run 'make'; you'll need developer tools like Autoconf installed to 
do that.

I expect PGI's lack of support is inadvertent: that is, I suspect the 
PGI folks think that PGI supports C99 'extern inline', but the support 
is buggy. As a PGI user you might file a bug report with them, and you 
can point them at the Bison 3.0.4 source code as an example of the bug.