cant find libl on centos 9 - /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -ll - c

Question

Brand new install of centos 9. (mostly minimal)
I did a find and there is no libl.so on my machine.
sudo yum install bison
Last metadata expiration check: 1:52:29 ago on Wed 23 Feb 2022 01:25:31 PM EST.
Package bison-3.7.4-5.el9.x86_64 is already installed.
sudo yum install flex
Last metadata expiration check: 1:52:25 ago on Wed 23 Feb 2022 01:25:31 PM EST.
Package flex-2.6.4-9.el9.x86_64 is already installed.
sudo yum install flex-devel
Last metadata expiration check: 1:52:35 ago on Wed 23 Feb 2022 01:25:31 PM EST.
No match for argument: flex-devel
I tried installing sudo yum groupinstall 'Development Tools'
nothing works, any ideas?

Answer 1

The static libraries (libfl.a and libl.a), which is what were provided before in the package flex-devel, have been moved to the package libfl-static. I don't know if RedHat ever provided shared objects; there's a note in the libfl-static ChangeLog that seems to be saying that there is a new package called libfl2 with shared objects, but I don't see it in the package repo. Anyway, static libraries should be fine. There's hardly anything there.
If you're using libl, that means that:
you aren't using %option noyywrap, which will remove the call to yywrap (and if you're using the version of yywrap in libl, then you don't need it to call the function, since that version unconditionally returns 1), and/or
you haven't provided your own main function.
I strongly recommend including the following options in all flex files, unless you have a clear need for the suppressed features:
%option noinput nounput noyywrap nodefault
The main function in libl is also trivial. It can be replaced with:
int main(void) {
while (yylex() != 0) { }
return 0;
}

Answer 2

As you pointed out in the question - flex-devel is not found.
It's in the PowerTools repo.
The 'official' way to enable the repo is to use the yum config-manager command line:
yum config-manager --set-enabled powertools
This may give an error about being missing the config-manager command:
No such command: config-manager
If this happens, then you can install the dnf-plugins-core package:
yum install -y dnf-plugins-core
and then enable the powertools repo, and then you should be able to yum install flex-devel, which provides:
$ rpmquery --list flex-devel
/usr/lib64/libfl.a
/usr/lib64/libfl_pic.a
/usr/lib64/libl.a
/usr/share/doc/flex
/usr/share/licenses/flex-devel
/usr/share/licenses/flex-devel/COPYING