Hi Simon,
> Bug #2: ./bootstrap writes to the path indicated by --gnulib-srcdir with
> the 'git checkout' command, and leaves the --gnulib-srcdir path at that
> commit after ./bootstrap is finished. This happens to work in my
> example since I pointed it to a writable work tree, but I think altering
> that path is unexpected and not documented. Imagine pointing this to a
> system-wide gnulib .git store like --gnulib-srcdir=/usr/share/src/gnulib
> or similar read-only place. Or imagine multiple ./bootstrap running at
> the same time for different projects, both pointing to the same gnulib
> .git work tree. I think the path indicated by --gnulib-srcdir should be
> read-only.
If --gnulib-srcdir is given and GNULIB_REVISION is set in bootstrap.conf:
* The current behaviour (now independent of submodule or not) is that
- Without --no-git, the GNULIB_REVISION is checked out in $GNULIB_SRCDIR.
If this directory has local modifications, git reports an error, and
'bootstrap' fails. If it does not have local modifications, the
$GNULIB_SRCDIR is left in that modified state.
- With --no-git, the contents of $GNULIB_SRCDIR is left unmodified.
So, the user has the possibility to force the behaviour they desire.
* But I agree that it would be useful to change
"If the environment variable GNULIB_SRCDIR is set, then sources are
fetched from that local directory. If it is a git repository and the
configuration variable GNULIB_REVISION is set in bootstrap.conf, then
that revision is checked out."
to
"If the environment variable GNULIB_SRCDIR is set, then sources are
fetched from that local directory. If the configuration variable
GNULIB_REVISION is set in bootstrap.conf, it is ignored."
for 3 reasons:
- As a simple-to-remember rule, $GNULIB_SRCDIR would always be left
unmodified.
- The purpose of GNULIB_REVISION is to simulate a submodule without
actually having a git submodule. Only very few packages use this:
GNU make, man-db, libpipeline, binfmt-support. Probably they wanted
to avoid submodules because of the extra learning curve associated
with git submodules.
The submodule is only considered in the case that GNULIB_SRCDIR
is not set. Therefore, it would be consistent to consider GNULIB_REVISION
also only when GNULIB_SRCDIR is not set.
- The recipe for using a modified gnulib
./bootstrap --no-git --gnulib-srcdir=...
would be simplified to
./bootstrap --gnulib-srcdir=...
And what would a user do who was using GNULIB_SRCDIR and _wants_ the
GNULIB_REVISION to be respected? They would set GNULIB_REFDIR instead of
GNULIB_SRCDIR. (This is precisely the point of GNULIB_REFDIR!)
Bruno
