awk's equality-comparison operator is "==" not "=".  We got this right
in many places, but not in configure's checks for supported version
numbers of flex and perl.  It hadn't been noticed because unsupported
versions are so old as to be basically extinct in the wild, and because
the only consequence is whether or not a WARNING flies by during
configure.

Daniel Gustafsson noted the problem with respect to the test for flex,
I found the other by reviewing other awk calls.