Re: proposal to fork the build-tools projects

[Tom Lord]

I personally pretty much agree with the larger picture you propose --
but we can separate concerns.

Forking the build tools projects is orthogonal to any particular
direction to take the non-bootstrapping fork.

-t



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   Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 09:57:23 -0700
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   Tom Lord wrote:
   > 
   > * Maintaining the build tools (autoconf etc) is currently too hard.
   > 
   > The maintainers have to struggle to write portable shell code;....
   > 
   > Those constraints really matter to a small number of packages (the
   > "bootstrap packages") but could be reasonably relaxed for other
   > packages.

   I'm not alone?

   > Let's then formally identify a _subset_ of the bootstrap packages,
   > which are those GNU tools that other (non-bootstrap) GNU packages are
   > allowed to depend on for the build process.  For example, GNU Make
   > would probably be in this subset, as would a GNU shell.  Call this set
   > the "build environment packages".

   To this should be added a "backfill" library.
   Programmers will know that ``#include <backfill.h>''
   will ensure that all the standard POSIX-isms will be defined
   and ``-lbackfill'' will ensure that much of the commonly
   omitted functions will be added as well.  Get rid of all
   that configury testing cruft.  It'll just "be there".