Re: [bug-inetutils] The quirks of the bootstrap script

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   The thing is that there are no sufficiently recent autotools
   available in OpenBSD. Thus my work in porting the present source
   tress imposes a need to perform the bootstrapping with GNU/Linux,
   followed by some transfer to the BSD system.

Can you not install autoconf/automake locally?  Say in the top-level
source directory of inetutils, under _deps...

   My intuitive expectation, called for by the word "bootstrap", is
   that the action should generate a resulting content equivalent to
   an official release archive, although littered by various VCS
   files, in this case for the book keeping of Git's.

Not directly, ./bootstrap checkouts a copy of gnulib, and does some
more steps.  The way to get something equivialent to a offical release
archive is via `make distcheck'.

   Under the present circumstance this does not work. The source can
   be configured (my standard choice is the bare modifier
   CFLAGS="-Wall"), but compilation is always aborted since

       lib/unlocked-io.h

   is dangling soft link, lacking a target. I interpret this as a
   misconceived bootstraping script, until better educated!

Can you report this to address@hidden  Seems like a bug, I think
that a tree, and "./bootstrap" should be self contained.

   When performing the bootstrapping under GNU/Linux, there are many
   messages passing by, but I have in particular observed some
   warnings that certain header files are not maintained using Git,
   while others are.

gnulib copies some, and munged others while you do a gnulib import.

   I also notice that the particular file "lib/unlocked-io.h" ought to
   be related to the fact that "bootstrap.conf" mentions "unlocked-io"
   as one of the modules from GNUlib on which GNU Inetutils itself
   depends.

I removed unlocked-io from bootstrap.conf, don't see a real need for
it.