Re: cannot build from git/no daily snapshots

[Gary V. Vaughan]

On 16 Sep 2012, at 08:19, Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Sep 2012, Christian Rössel wrote:
>> 
>> I tried to build libtool from git but failed during bootstrap. bootstrap
>> asked me the questions
>> 
>> Reversed (or previously applied) patch detected!  Assume -R? [n]
>> Apply anyway? [n]
> 
> I re-started my git checkout from scratch and now I am stuck at the same 
> point as you.
> 
> I know next to nothing about gnulib but clearly something from 
> gnulib/gnulib-tool is causing this problem.

There were a number of problems caused by not having kept libtool and its
gnulib patch files (among others) in sync with the particular version of
gnulib it was using.

Now fixed.

> The bootstrap script is 70K bytes now.

Ralf asked that we don't roll a bespoke bootstrap, but use the one from gnulib.
Except the one in gnulib can't work with a complicated bootstrap such as the
one required for libtool.  I rewrote gnulib's bootstrap for them to be powerful
and configurable enough to work even in libtool, but upstream rejected the
rewrite as too large to review.

End result - libtool is now using the more powerful and configurable bootstrap
script that was originally destined for gnulib itself, because the old libtool
bootstrap was brittle and bespoke, and the gnulib bootstrap needs to be heavily
patched (and those patches maintained) to manage our bootstrap process.

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