Re: a saner bootstrap script

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi Bruno,

Thanks for the advice, see below for the result.

Hi Pádraig, Jim,

Is there anything else I can do to help you incorporate this, and the
matching bootstrap.conf I wrote for you into coreutils now that the
release is out?

All,

Sorry for the late reply, thanks to unreasonably late raining season storms; my
electricity and Internet have been off and on a lot recently.

On 7 Oct 2011, at 02:54, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
>> There is
>> an underlying assumption here that if AM_GNU_GETTEXT was seen in 
>> configure.ac,
>> then
>> gettext was checked for already, and so autopoint should be available too.
>> Perhaps
>> the right fix, then, is to note when configure.ac indicates that autopoint is
>> necessary to bootstrap, and causes bootstrap to exit with a diagnostic if 
>> not?
> 
> Absolutely, yes. One of the purposes of 'bootstrap' is to recover all files
> that were omitted from version control. Regarding gettext's infrastructure,
> the fact that such files were omitted are indicated by the presence of
> an invocation of AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION, see
> <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Files-under-CVS.html>
> 
> If such an invocation is present, and 'autopoint' is not present in $PATH
> or found through the AUTOPOINT environment variable, you should bail out.
> It makes no sense to continue if the script cannot produce the necessary
> files.

I checked in a small patch today to do the AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION check using
the autopoint binary instead of the gettext binary, which causes my saner
bootstrap to behave exactly as you describe.  Now, in my coreutils branch:

 $ ./bootstrap                                                              
 bootstrap: `./bootstrap' differs from `./gnulib/build-aux/bootstrap',
 bootstrap: please consider adopting the canonical version from gnulib.
 bootstrap: error: `autopoint' not found
 bootstrap: error: README-prereq explains how to obtain these prerequisite 
programs:
 bootstrap:        Program    Min_version Homepage
 bootstrap:        -----------------------------------------------------------
 bootstrap:        bison      -           http://www.gnu.org/s/bison
 bootstrap:        git        1.4.4       http://git-scm.com
 bootstrap:        gperf      -           http://www.gnu.org/s/gperf
 bootstrap:        gzip       -           http://www.gnu.org/s/gzip
 bootstrap:        makeinfo   -           http://www.gnu.org/s/texinfo
 bootstrap:        patch      -           http://www.gnu.org/s/patch
 bootstrap:        perl       5.5         http://perl.com
 bootstrap:        rsync      -           http://www.samba.org/rsync
 bootstrap:        tar        -           http://www.gnu.org/s/tar
 bootstrap:        xz         -           http://tukaani.org/xz
 bootstrap:        autoconf   2.64        http://www.gnu.org/s/autoconf
 bootstrap:        automake   1.11.1      http://www.gnu.org/s/automake
 bootstrap:        autopoint  0.18.1      http://www.gnu.org/s/gettext
 bootstrap:        -----------------------------------------------------------  
     
 $ PATH=/usr/local/Cellar/gettext/0.17/bin:$PATH ./bootstrap
 bootstrap: `./bootstrap' differs from `./gnulib/build-aux/bootstrap',
 bootstrap: please consider adopting the canonical version from gnulib.
 bootstrap: error: `autopoint' version == 0.17 is too old
 bootstrap:        `autopoint' version >= 0.18 is required
 [[...]]
 $ AUTOPOINT=/usr/local/Cellar/gettext/0.18.1.1/bin/autopoint ./bootstrap -v
 [[...]]
 bootstrap: found `/usr/local/Cellar/gettext/0.18.1.1/bin/autopoint' version >= 
0.18.1
 [[...]]

I've pushed this version to my github mirror of coreutils:

 https://github.com/gvvaughan/GNU-coreutils/blob/gary/bootstrap/bootstrap

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)