Re: autoreconf --force seemingly does not forcibly update everything

[Simon Josefsson]

Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> writes:

> Bernhard Voelker wrote:
>>  > Last month, I spent 2 days on prerelease testing of coreutils. If, after
>>  > downloading the carefully prepared tarball from ftp.gnu.org, the first
>>  > thing a distro does is to throw away the *.m4 files and regenerate the
>>  > configure script with their own one,
>>  >    * It shows [...]
>> 
>> FWIW: especially the downstream builds of the 'coreutils' package have been
>> using 'autoreconf -fi' for a long time, because the upstream tools do not
>> have full I18N support, and the large I18N patch is in use e.g. at Fedora,
>> openSUSE and Debian probably since >15 years.
>
> Sure, if downstream applies a patch that modifies bootstrap.conf, they need
> to rerun 'bootstrap'.

Is bootstrap intended to be reliable from within a tarball?  I thought
the bootstrap script was not included in tarballs because it wasn't
designed to be ran that way, and the way it is designed may not give
expected results.  Has this changed, so we should recommend maintainers
to 'EXTRA_DIST = bootstrap bootstrap-funclib.sh bootstrap.conf' so this
is even possible?  I recall some project already added something to that
effect, but I'm not sure if that is something gnulib supports?

/Simon

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