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boostrapping hello?!


From: Bruno Haible
Subject: boostrapping hello?!
Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 15:46:53 +0200
User-agent: KMail/1.5

Hi,

The script from the GNU hello CVS explains itself like this:

$ ./bootstrap 
Bootstrapping CVS Hello with:
  aclocal -I gnulib/m4 && autoheader && automake && autoconf

The term "bootstrapping" in this context is confusing and inadequate.
"Bootstrapping" means to resolve a circular build dependency, usually of
a compiler. It is needed for "bash", "make", "as", "gcc", "flex", "bison"
and a few programming language compilers like "sbcl". For the vast majority
of packages, however, - including GNU hello - this script does nothing more
to generate autogenerated files. The GNOME people are therefore calling this
script "autogen.sh" [1][2]. (The suffix .sh is because the file comes from a CVS
and therefore may lose its execution permissions on Woe32 filesystems;
it's a reminder what to do with this script if it is not executable.)

I would suggest to
  1) change the message to "Preparing CVS Hello infrastructure",
  2) rename the script to autogen.sh.

Bruno

[1] http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/glib/
[2] http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gtk+/





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