Re: Autotools-generated 'configure' & 'Makefile.in' considered binaries?

[Jonathan McHugh]

Hi Ludo,

April 1, 2022 11:01 AM, "Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> 
> This is conceptually the “right thing”, but it raises a significant
> bootstrapping problem. Our bootstrap path currently focuses on being
> able to run shell scripts, in particular ‘configure’ scripts, before we
> can even build Bash, thanks to Gash and Gash-Utils. If we were to build
> the autotools machinery systematically, we’d need Gash-Utils to provide
> a Perl and an M4 implementation. (Now, Timothy has written an Awk
> interpreter, so a Perl interpreter can’t be so hard, right? :-))
> The other option is to write an Autoconf and Automake implementation…
> 

A huge Awk fan, have you got a reference for Timothy's interpreter?

> As a first milestone, maybe we could start running ‘autoreconf’ more
> often, for packages higher in the graph. We could change the
> ‘bootstrap’ build phase to do that unless it’s explicitly turned off.
> It may turn out to be a Sisyphean task though…
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Ludo’.



====================
Jonathan McHugh
indieterminacy@libre.brussels