Re: gnulib-tool and autoreconf

[Bruno Haible]

Colin Watson wrote:
> I find the advice in gnulib's documentation "Caveat: gettextize and
> autopoint users" rather difficult to follow in practice. I prefer to use
> autoreconf rather than having to track which tools and options I'm
> supposed to be using, but autoreconf invokes autopoint followed by the
> other tools without letting me interpose a call to gnulib-tool. Of
> course I could call autopoint and gnulib-tool myself and then call
> autoreconf with AUTOPOINT=/bin/true, but that's clumsy at best.

It would seem odd to have 'autoreconf' invoke 'gnulib-tool'. gnulib-tool
is a tool that *fetches* source files, whereas autoreconf is a tool that
*combines* source files, generating additional files from them.
Therefore gnulib-tool logically belongs before autoreconf.

Also I'd like to avoid to have mutual dependencies between autoconf/automake
and gnulib.

Therefore I would find it better if autopoint had an option that tells it
not to overwrite .m4 files installed by gnulib-tool, or if that behaviour
was even the default. What do you think?

Bruno