Re: gettext in bootstrap-tools

[Joel E. Denny]

Hi Bruno,

On Sat, 31 Jul 2010, Bruno Haible wrote:

> > On the bison mailing lists, it was recently suggested that bison should 
> > include gettext in bootstrap-tools in cfg.mk.  That sounds reasonable to 
> > me, but I see that coreutils and m4 don't do this.
> 
> The gnulib 'gettext' module is a substitute for part of what 'gettextize' or
> 'autopoint' installs. Since I see [1] that bison omits Makefile.in.in from
> the git repository, if you use the 'gettext' module, you should also ensure
> that you copy the files from gnulib/build-aux/po/* into po/ and runtime-po/,
> using "gnulib-tool --copy-file". You will then also have to invoke
> 'autoreconf' with AUTOPOINT=':', so that autopoint is not run.
> 
> It is simpler to rely on what the 'bootstrap' script does by default.
> Like coreutils and m4 do.

It sounds like you are giving me advice on whether to include gettext in 
gnulib_modules in bootstrap.conf.  Like coreutils, bison already does 
that, and I was not considering changing it.

My question is about whether to include gettext in bootstrap-tools in 
cfg.mk.  As far as I know, that only affects whether its version is listed 
as a bootstrap tool by announce-gen.

> > Is there any general  
> > rule of thumb about which tools are significant enough to be listed?
> 
> When you choose from the list of gnulib modules [2], I don't understand
> what you mean by "significant"? Either you need a certain module, based
> on its description, or not. Can you rephrase the question?

In the case of bootstrap-tools, perhaps "significant" wasn't the right 
word either.  I am looking for some guideline on how to determine whether 
it's helpful to list any given tool and its version in bison release 
announcements.  In some cases, it seems obvious.  For example, the user 
might want to know what version of autoconf, automake, flex, or gnulib was 
used to bootstrap bison, but I'm fairly confident that most people do not 
care what version of Bourne shell or coreutils I happened to use during 
bootstrap.  However, in general, I'm not sure how to find the line, and 
specifically I'm not sure which side of the line gettext falls on.

Thanks.