Re: update to latest gnulib and clean-up

[Jim Meyering]

Reuben Thomas wrote:
> On 28 April 2011 09:52, Jim Meyering <address@hidden> wrote:
>> +# The following rule is not designed to be portable,
>> +# and relies on tools that not everyone has.
>
> Could the dependencies be listed in the comments, please? And perhaps
> even checked for during configuration (but obviously without failure
> if not found), and then with a check in maint.mk that fails if they
> were not found? Basically, just formalise the idea of a maintainer
> dependency.

I wrote that comment a long time ago.
One (perhaps the only?) dependency is on nm and on the format of its output.
There is a hard-coded "perl", but that's hardly a problem, these days.

IMHO, checking for such things at configuration is unwarranted.
If you want to check for nm and ensure that it exists and
generates the expected output, the test belongs in this rule,
not in some distant other file.

I'm thinking about simply remove those two lines.
People who run "make syntax-check" should be prepared to
do a little investigation if something doesn't work properly.