Re: adding bootstrap and bootstrap.conf

[Bruno Haible]

Jim Meyring wrote:
> My impression is that few (if any) of the autogen scripts use gnulib

The one in gettext does.

> there's another definition (the first one when I type "dict bootstrap")
> that is more evocative: to load and initialize the operating system on
> a computer.  Normally abbreviated to "{boot}".

Well, that's the definition for computer-illiterate persons, not for
hackers :-) Besides that, gnulib is not an operating system.

> With coreutils, one motivation was that I (and Paul, too, I presume) want
> all gnulib-imported files to end up in e.g., lib/ and m4/ directories,
> alongside any version-controlled files that may already be there.

This was not possible with gnulib-tool initially, but gnulib-tool now
supports this mode of operation since 2006-08-31.

Paul Eggert wrote:
> Another motivation was that gnulib-tool was overenthusiastic about
> installing files, particularly gettext-related files, and it was so
> much of a pain to remove them after installing them that I found it
> easier to install them into a scratch area and then not bother to copy
> the files I didn't want. As I recall the problem was complicated by
> our preferring our own sources to gnulib's in some cases.

Can you try to solve both problems through overrides in
coreutils/gl/modules/gettext.diff and coreutils/gl/m4/* ?
If you get that working, I can see what needs to be changed in gnulib's
gettext module. In the current state, I don't even have a precise problem
description.

Besides that, I plan to make the following special hack to gnulib-tool, to
solve the problems between autopoint and gnulib-tool for the short term:
  - Have gnulib-tool give an error when configure.ac (via
    AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION) specifies an older version of the gettext
    infrastructure than the one supported by gnulib,
  - Have gnulib-tool invoke autopoint, taking care to move away gnulib's
    copies and moving them back afterwards.
Granted, "autoreconf" still will have a problem in this situation...

> I have been meaning to look into the problem at some point, but it's been
> low priority, since the existing bootstrap script works.

This has become urgent now: We're now having partial overlap of functionality
between gnulib-tool and 'bootstrap'.

Bruno