Big picture of building & packaging

[dev]

Hi all,

Brief background: I'm debugging a difference in behavior between v0.21 and 
v0.21.1 on OSX as part of building something in the nixpkgs project. I have 
exhausted some easy / low-tech ways to find out the root cause and would like 
to bisect gettext.

The problem is that nixpkgs builds gettext from source in the released tar 
files and not from the Git repository, so I need to translate from one to the 
other. For instance, as you know, the tar files have gnulib vendored under 
gettext-tools while the repository does not. I poked around a little and tried 
"./gitsub.sh pull" followed by "./autogen.sh" and ran into some error related 
to patching files (on an M1 Mac).

I can debug that and push this to the end, but I'm worried about sinking a lot 
of time unproductively if the actual packaging process is completely different. 
Would you be able to advise me on whether I am on the right track here?

Thank you for your time,

Teddy