Re: split bootstrap in two phases

[Simon Josefsson]

Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> writes:

> Recent discussion in gnu-prog-discuss has shown that making the separation
> into two phases (1) and (2) explicit will have several benefits:

Wonderful, thank you!  I have yet to digest everything, so I'll fall
back on stylistic comments:

> The first phase is a script 'autopull.sh'.
> The second phase is a script 'autogen.sh'.
...
> The names of these scripts end with '.sh' in order to make them easily
> editable in editors that recognize the file type from the suffix.

What do you think about dropping the .sh suffix?  As far as I know, few
if any tools that users/developers are expected to invoke have a .sh
extension.  To me, these scripts are similar to ./configure or
./bootstrap and we haven't used the .sh suffix for those.

I know autogen.sh is a common idiom, but it does different things in
different projects, so keeping the same name may not really be
important.  That may even be a reason to chose a different name than
autogen.sh for our new well-defined and documented purpose of the script
you propose.

Hmm.  Thinking about all this, do we really need two new scripts?  There
is inflation in all these tools and documentation files.  Could the
separation be done via './bootstrap --pull' and './bootstrap --generate'
with the default './bootstrap' be to do both?  While internally the
implementation needs a significant change, externally and
documentation-wise it is not a large change.  Making sure that
./bootstrap --generate never ever pull things from the Internet is
critical, and is more complex than if that part was separated.

I've yet to catch up on the gnu-prog-discuss followups, but hope to get
to it in the upcoming week..

/Simon

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