Paul Eggert wrote: > But why are there two shell scripts > gnulib-tool and gnulib-tool.py? Can't the latter be folded into the > former? That would be simpler and faster.
This will be done when we drop support for the old shell-based implementation and for the GNULIB_TOOL_IMPL environment variable. In a year or so. Until then, it is simpler to keep things as-is, because - In gnulib-tool, we have invocations of gnulib-tool.py at 3 different places. - There are error messages such as "gnulib-tool.py produced different files than gnulib-tool.sh! Compare `pwd` and $tmp." When they occur, the user will need/want to run gnulib-tool.py explicitly. Sure, one could transform gnulib-tool.py into a shell function in gnulib-tool. But what's the point, when it's only for a minimal speedup and only for a limited time? Bruno