RE: GNU packs with generated README

[Ronald Landheer]

In response to both Tim and Akim:

>> An obvious, though not very elegant, solution would be to bootstrap 
>> like this instead:
>> --
>> #!/bin/sh
>> 
>> noreadme=
>> test -f README || noreadme=yes
>> test x$noreadme = x || touch README
>> set -x
>> aclocal
>> autoheader
>> automake -i --add-missing --copy
>> set +x
>> test x$noreadme = x || rm README
This is more or less what I did to work around the problem (though I 
touched README in any case, and touched one of the sources of README as 
well, so README would be regenerated later) but as you say, it is not 
very elegant and hence, what I would like to avoid having to do.

> Please, promote autoreconf use for bootstrapping.  That way, we will
> be reported more cases, more bugs etc. which is always a good thing.
> In addition, in the future, if we add new people in the build system
> (such as the replacement of aclocal), although the actual chain of
> commands will have changed, the autoreconf call will remain constant.
The problem with autoreconf is that I loose control over the reconf 
process, which gets me stuck with this problem and no way to work 
around it without calling autoreconf from a bootstrap script..

Ronald