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)
