Re: declaring only the functions that are defined

[Simon Josefsson]

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:

> Simon, I have not included patches to gc.h and hmac.h, because I don't
> understand these modules well enough.

After thinking more about this, prompted by the caveat that this may
not work perfectly with multiple gnulib directories in the same
package (which is something I use in several projects), it seems that
these changes binds source code in gnulib even harder to gnulib-tool.

I know gnulib never promised to provide code that worked without the
gnulib-tool machinery, but previously the tweaks to make that work
anyway was small.  Now they are larger.  Before, you'd typically only
have to copy the source code and the M4 files, and arrange for the M4
macros to be called, and the code would work.  I know of some projects
that use gnulib this way (some parts of GnuPG, for example).

In the long run, it is probably not is worth the effort to support
non-gnulib-tool uses of gnulib, but I believe it will make gnulib
appear more difficult to use, and some users may walk away, which
results in a less widely used gnulib.

However, I don't yet have any practical problems from this, so this
should only be read as opinions and food for thought.  I will do a
gnulib-tool --import in my projects in the next few days, and will
likely spot the real problems, if there are any.

/Simon