Re: what to do about gnulib

[Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>]

Hi Andy,

> Question, do you think it would be reasonable for autopoint to avoid
> overwriting newer files?  It seems like the sort of problem we could
> avoid, but who knows.

Such a solution would be
  - partly ineffective, because Gnulib has only recently started to use
    '# serial ...' annotations (with the correct syntax) in its *.m4 files,
  - hairy, because it could lead to one file being copied and another file
    being not copied. In other words, it's a heuristic, and heuristics are
    buggy.

Although it's not perfect, it's probably better to let the package maintainer
decide whether to run 'autopoint' and at which moment.

> > The way Guile handles versioning of Gnulib-imported files is fine.
> 
> That's great to hear.  In that case, no change planned to how we do
> things.

Well, through the new fast gnulib-tool [1] there is now the opportunity to
remove the copied gnulib files from your package's repository [2].
If a gnulib-tool invocation is added to autogen.sh, it no longer takes more
time to execute than the rest of autogen.sh.

Bruno

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2024-04/msg00003.html
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2024-04/msg00320.html