antlr@2: deprecate

[danielnachun]

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[SMillerDev]

Is the patch upstreamed?

[cho-m]

I don't think antlr@2 is maintained anymore (2.7.7 is from 2006. No repo). antlr v3 and v4 are maintained.

I assume we haven't deprecated it due to nco, which is actively maintained. Looks like nco also keeps a patched tarball of antlr@2 with similar fix (at least for cstring) as mentioned in http://nco.sourceforge.net/#bld and nco/nco#58. Based on comments, it doesn't seem likely that antlr version will be updated in near future.

[SMillerDev]

It's a shame that NCO is a popular formula, but if they refuse to use supported versions of antlr I think we should deprecate it.

CC @Homebrew/core for opinions

[MikeMcQuaid]

It's a shame that NCO is a popular formula, but if they refuse to use supported versions of antlr I think we should deprecate it.

Alternatively, we should just use their patched version in the formula. I have little preference either way but, if pushed, would very lightly prefer deprecation.

[danielnachun]

There is an upstream issue about this: https://sourceforge.net/p/nco/discussion/9831/thread/1a424aac/. I think they had a good reason at the time not to migrate to ANTLR4 - it had incomplete C++ support compared to ANTLR 2. Would it be worth asking them if more recent versions of ANTLR4 would now work?

[cho-m]

Based on comments in that issue and on March 2022 in nco/nco#58, the upstream will review/accept PRs to update parser, but aren't planning to work on it themselves. The problem is moving from ANTLR2 to ANTLR4 may require a rewrite of entire grammar given changes in AST generation and other parts.

[danielnachun]

I am going to see if I can use the patched copy of ANTLR 2 that nco uses as a resource instead of this formula. If that works, we can update nco to depend on that instead, and then deprecate this formula.

[danielnachun]

The URLs to the patched copies are dead, but it looks like nco is hosting a copy of antlr2 on GitHub which they use: https://github.com/nco/antlr2. I can make a pull request there to fix the missing <include>. That seems like a viable option to fix ANTLR2 until they can migrate to ANTLR4, and we can still deprecated antlr@2 as nothing is else using it.

[danielnachun]

Now that #103967 is merged and nco is bottled on Linux, nothing uses antlr@2 so it is time to deprecate this.