Re: GNUMakefile: don't fail if there is no .tarball-version

[Simon Josefsson]

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:

> Eric Blake wrote:
>>   In fact, it might be worth a patch to gnulib-tool, rather than to
>> GNUmakefile, to guarantee that --create-testdir creates .tarball-version
>> to simulate the 'make dist' process of any package which uses the
>> GNUmakefile module.
>
> I disagree: gnulib-tool should not do special actions to please particular
> modules. (The 'alloca' module is a special exception, because it's specially
> handled in automake.)
>
> The 'gnumakefile' in particular does not provide functionality to the user
> of the package, only to the maintainer. It does not change the way "make" and
> "make check" work. It has no test suite. Therefore it doesn't make much sense
> to include it in --create-testdir.

It seems the patch isn't enough, the infloop still happens.  The reason
seems to be that maintainer-makefile is not filtered out, and it depends
on gnumakefile.

I'm not sure these gnulib-tool hacks are the right solution though.  It
seems to me like it would be useful to make GNUmakefile more robust, and
having it fail more gracefully when a .tarball-version file is missing.
But I don't care strongly about it.

/Simon