Hi, The script from the GNU hello CVS explains itself like this:
$ ./bootstrap Bootstrapping CVS Hello with: aclocal -I gnulib/m4 && autoheader && automake && autoconf The term "bootstrapping" in this context is confusing and inadequate. "Bootstrapping" means to resolve a circular build dependency, usually of a compiler. It is needed for "bash", "make", "as", "gcc", "flex", "bison" and a few programming language compilers like "sbcl". For the vast majority of packages, however, - including GNU hello - this script does nothing more to generate autogenerated files. The GNOME people are therefore calling this script "autogen.sh" [1][2]. (The suffix .sh is because the file comes from a CVS and therefore may lose its execution permissions on Woe32 filesystems; it's a reminder what to do with this script if it is not executable.) I would suggest to 1) change the message to "Preparing CVS Hello infrastructure", 2) rename the script to autogen.sh. Bruno [1] http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/glib/ [2] http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gtk+/
