Paul Eggert <egg...@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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