[bug-hello] gnulib and hello

[Karl Berry]

About gnulib and hello.

The vision of gnulib is to provide files for sharing at the source
level, by maintainers who want the latest and (hopefully) best files.
Overall I think this is a good thing for Hello to recommend.

That's the theoretical argument.  The practical argument is that there
is no other way to get the nontrivial functionality (close_stdout,
error, etc.) that Jim mentioned.

Next point: because gnulib is intended for incorporation into source
distributions, it is not appropriate for it to be installed in the usual
way.  (Thus I think Debian was quite wrong to make a package for it.)
The whole point is to get the *latest* files, and that means using the
files from gnulib cvs.

And therefore I do not think it makes sense, even in theory, for
autoreconf to ever call gnulib-tool.  Autoreconf *is* intended to be
installed.  Mixing installed programs and cvs programs ... no thanks.

What autoreconf can do, as I mentioned in my other message, is avoid
overwriting newer files with older ones.  (This is nontrivial in itself,
since it has to find the serial numbers or timestamps inside the file to
compare.)

If that were done, then I can imagine autoreconf including a snapshot of
various gnulib modules, or maybe even gnulib in toto, at its releases.
Then maintainers who want to stay a little behind the bleeding edge can
at least get updates with new autoconf releases.  And those who use
gnulib will not be hurt by it, and could also use autoreconf for all
that other things it does.

karl

P.S. Just for the record, there is/was another way to get stuff from
gnulib (or anywhere else), namely the srclist-update script I wrote
(it's in gnulib/config).  This is my kludge to autoupdate stuff from
other places into gnulib, and from gnulib into texinfo, that I wrote
before gnulib-tool existed.  It just lists files to be copied from one
location to another.

These days, however, gnulib modules are so complex that the simple
srclist-update approach is no longer reliable, since it requires listing
every file to be copied.  So I think Hello must use gnulib-tool.