ps> I am not familiar with automake's development model, but in
general for all GNU packages, at least:
It's the same for Automake. (Not that I wrote any of Automake's
bootstrap script -- I don't believe it's changed in many years.)
Cf> running ./bootstrap (or autoreconf -fvi manually which seems
more common) in a tarball will often cause breakages with cryptic
error messages.
I can't do anything about autoreconf, but it would be easy to have
bootstrap look for a sibling .git directory (say) and give a warning, or
even a fatal error, if it doesn't exist. Or is there some usefulness to
being able to run bootstrap in the tarball?
Or, wait, let's back up. Why is bootstrap in the tarball in the first
place? Does every package distribute it? No, I see it's not in the GNU
make or autoconf tarballs. So I guess automake should not include it
either? I can't find any record of an explicit decision about it in the
ChangeLog or elsewhere, though Stefano mentioned that it is so:
2012-04-28 Stefano Lattarini <stefano.lattar...@gmail.com>
fixup: avoid unconditional re-bootstrapping on "make dist"
Since our 'bootstrap' script is distributed ...
[Change subsequently obsoleted, but anyway.]
Maybe someone with more git-fu than me can search through the commit
messages to see if there's any explanation of why "bootstrap" is listed
in EXTRA_DIST (in the top-level Makefile.am)?
Thanks,
Karl
