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

[Simon Josefsson]

Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:

> On 4/10/24 13:36, Simon Josefsson via Gnulib discussion list wrote:
>> 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.
>
> It's pretty routinely distributed, I expect under the theory that
> we're being transparent about what sources we use to generate the
> tarball.
>
> Whether it works from a tarball depends on one's definition of
> "works". Certainly more expertise and tools are needed to bootstrap
> than merely to configure + make.

The definition for "works" seems fairly permissive: running ./bootstrap
from, e.g., the coreutils 9.5 tarball dies instantly due to this:

  if test -n "$checkout_only_file" && test ! -r "$checkout_only_file"; then
    die "Running this script from a non-checked-out distribution is risky."
  fi

I see that some projects (including coreutils) add bootstrap to
EXTRA_DIST, but I can't find any recommendation in the gnulib manual to
do that so I had assumed it is not something we recommend generally.  I
haven't added it to inetutils, libidn2, gsasl, etc.

/Simon

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