Re: INSTALL nits

[Paul Eggert]

On 8/17/23 06:47, Gavin Smith wrote:

> This is an improvement, but there are still a couple left (made with
> @ref).

Thanks, fixed with the attached further patch.


> It would make sense to use "INSTALL.ISO"
> as INSTALL in packages.

In old-fashioned packages perhaps. Nowadays a lot of packages use UTF-8 
in their source files anyway.

I understand the reluctance to go beyond ASCII. Long ago I dealt with 
displays that couldn't even handle all of ASCII. But nowadays it 
generally isn't worth worrying about this stuff. Pretty much every 
builder can deal with the UTF-8 characters in INSTALL.


> In the Texinfo package, the script is called "autogen.sh".  I doubt that
> it offers more "fine-grained control" (as stated in the current text of
> INSTALL) but appears to be just another name for this script.

That part of the documentation is talking about the practice, supported 
by Gnulib, of having two bootstrapping scripts.  One, autopull.sh, 
fetches stuff from the network (and therefore has network and privacy 
concerns); the other, autogen.sh, is purely local. Often 'bootstrap' 
does both but you can run just one script or the other.

Another common practice is for 'bootstrap' to have --pull and --gen 
options, to do (network-based) pulling and (local-based) generation, 
instead of autopull.sh and autogen.sh, and where if you don't use either 
--pull or --gen than 'bootstrap' does both. Gnulib supports this too.


> Is there any consistency in naming across different packages, i.e.
> is "bootstrap" the most widely used name?

Hard to say. I prefer 'bootstrap' but there's definitely an 'autogen.sh' 
and perhaps 'autopull.sh' camp. Which is why Gnulib supports both.

0001-Improve-INSTALL-format.patch
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