You need to be able to compile the bootstrap packages in minimal
environments, in order to get a very basic GNU environment.
I don't think we should do this at all. The smallest version of the
GNU system need not be "minimal", and making it so would be extra
work, so we should not.
Because autoconf was not designed with maintaining complete systems in
mind, every single distribution adds a "package manager" whose job is
to audit what is installed and manage dependencies among installed
packages.
Autoconf is not supposed to be a package manager; it is not meant
to decide which packages to install, only to decide how to build
a given package.
Even just the awkwardness of using m4 to
work-around broken shells makes hacking autoconf less than pleasant.
It could be that we should tell people to use Bash to build GNU
packages if their native shells have trouble handling the job. That
would be a smaller change and perhaps worth doing.
