[lsst-dm-stack-users] missing Bison etc.

[Robert Lupton the Good]

Dear Dave,

I'm usually sympathetic to such travails, but in this case I think you're a little wide of the mark.

> Of course, the cognoscenti realized yesterday afternoon that my local version (i.e., under /home/dgm/linux) of Bison would not be found by newinstall.sh, and that this exercise was just a waste of time.
> 
> It would seem that a BOLD FACE note on the Prerequisites page is that the subject utilities must be installed, and that they MUST be installed in root-ish paths like /usr or /bin or similar.

/usr/local/bin used to be the standard.

I don't think that they need be anywhere special.  They just have to be generally visible to the scripts.  That should just be a matter of having them in your default PATH (but I'd defer to Mario if he cleans that up).  It's a fine line, actually:  get all the standard things, but don't pick up per-user hacks.

> I am still mystified by the utter reliance of DM on root access.  I have forgotten if LSST is an FFRDC or just a scummy contractor, but I am amazed that such lax IT/IA security standards are legal given the you are spending Government money.

You do not need root access.  We assume that you have a normal machine where you ask your sysadmin to install packages such as bison --- yacc has been a standard part of unix since pre-1980 and bison since maybe 1990?

I am happy to work on reducing the prerequisites further, but you will need a modernish C++ compiler whatever we do.

							R

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