Re: Use of the m4 macros and standard package

[Karl Berry]

Hi Patrice and all,

    I think that the gnulib manual isn't very clear about the use of the macros

Very true.  No one has ever sat down and tried to write it as a manual,
just incrementally added stuff, so it's not clear about lots of things,
not to mention not having much of an overall structure.  Any and all
improvements are welcome.

    I also think that "complete" configure.ac and Makefile.am used as
    examples for a virtual very simple project using gnulib are missing.

I have in fact been changing GNU Hello over to using Gnulib.  The basics
are in Hello's CVS now, although much remains to be done.

    Last I think that gnulib is not advertised enough 

Well, it's in maintain.texi and standards.texi.  As more source
distributions use it, I suppose it will spread, if people like it.

I guess an announcement on info-gnu would be desirable, although it
would be nice if the documentation was better first :).

    Now the only way to install gnulib is to get it from CVS and run 
    gnulib-tool from the CVS sources, this is not standard for GNU things.

Sure, it is not standard, but that's not just capriciousness or
laziness: the whole idea of gnulib is to share files *at the source
level*.  If people are not comfortable with cvs checkouts (and autoconf
and ...), they shouldn't be using it.

The problem with using it from an installed location is that then a
release has to be downloaded and installed.  That is two extra steps
(which many people would not bother to do, so out-of-date files would
proliferate) that are a burden with no upside, as far as I can see.

At one point Debian was making a package out of it, although I tried to
discourage this.  Any kind of release or package will inevitably be out
of date the day it is released, and it's not practical to make a new
release every time a file changes.  Gnulib is a collection of disparate
functionality updated piecemeal nearly every day.

    what needs to go before gl_EARLY, between gl_EARLY and gl_INIT, and
    what's incompatible with both.

This is the kind of stuff we should definitely have in the manual.
Please feel free to do so, or tell me what to include.

    Perhaps there should be a source distribution which is like GNU hello,
    but makes use of gnulib, libtool and libintl.

libintl I thought we were no longer including in distributions.  libtool
I admit I find awfully big and confusing; I think it should have its own
Hello (if it doesn't).

Happy hacking,
Karl