Re: A better autogen.sh

[Jim Meyering]

chad wrote:
> On Mar 29, 2011, at 5:23 AM, Jim Meyering wrote:
>
>     Sure, but that's fine.  This is only stopgap, for those who
>     don't read the build instructions.  Those users are unlikely
>     to be doing a non-srcdir build.
>
> If we're still talking about my case, I read the instructions, but they were

I was talking about the general case.
Long ago, coreutils had no GNUmakefile.
For at least one user who was new to "build-from-source",
I heard that it did help.

> (temporarily) incorrect -- they told me that I would only have to do something
> once when I actually needed to do it second time.  As I understand it, this 
> was
> a small window of opportunity while the new system is being put into place. 
> Had
> I not been on the road at the time, I would have caught the need via email.
>
> For a more general ``doesn't read INSTALL.bzr'' situation, can we just 
> include a
> default Makefile (overwritten by the autogen machinery) that either instructs
> the user to read INSTALL.bzr or runs the autogen machinery? That doesn't seem
> like something that should require gnu make extensions, even.

Not really.  Either "Makefile" is version-controlled or it isn't.
Currently it is not.
As far as I know, bzr does not have a way to deposit a
non-version-controlled file in a just checked-out directory.