Re: self-downloading gnulib-tool

[Bruno Haible]

Ian Beckwith wrote:
> There is a wishlist bug report in debian:
> 
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=522187
> 
> suggesting an additional installer-style package for gnulib that
> downloads the latest version direct from the git repo.
> 
> It occurs to me that it might be better to have as an option to
> gnulib-tool, maybe --git-clone or something along those lines, with
> maybe an option to set up a cron job to pull from the master repo (bad
> idea if they are going to hack on gnulib itself, but I assume most
> people won't).

The downloading mechanism should IMO be part of Debian, not gnulib
upstream, because it involves
  - detection of presence/absence of internet connection,
  - choice of mirror,
  - verification of the integrity of the download.

Whether you present it as a gnulib-tool option, or provide a separate
script for doing that, I don't have an opinion about that.

Bruno