Re: adding bootstrap and bootstrap.conf

[Bruno Haible]

Hello Jim,

> Variants of this bootstrap script are being used in at least 6 or
> 7 different projects, and having it here seems like the best way
> to keep everyone up to date.  However there's plenty of room for
> improvement.

Well, I'd suggest two improvements:

First, the name. "Bootstrapping" means, according to Wikipedia [1][2],
a "solution to a chicken-and-egg problem". There is no such chicken-and-egg
problem here. A 'bootstrap' script makes sense for GNU bash or GNU sed, which
cannot assume that the user has sufficient tools for running a 'configure'
script. Or for GNU bison which needs a parser generated by itself to parse
its input files. But here? The tasks are to copy some files and generate
some others through the auto* tools.

GNOME and some other GNU projects use the name 'autogen.sh' for scripts with
this purpose. It's a well-known and self-explaining name. I'd suggest to
rename 'bootstrap' to 'autogen.sh'.

Second, the script applies gnulib-tool on a scratch subdirectory. This is
worrisome: it indicates that gnulib-tool does some things the wrong way.
Can you or Paul explain what is missing in gnulib-tool's working?

   Bruno


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(computing)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)