[Bug-zile] today's patch quake on master… an d a new topic branch

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi Reuben,

After you showed some interest in moving to my saner bootstrap script in
preference to the current gnulib script, I decided to add it on a new
topic branch, please check it out and merge back to master if you agree
that it is cleaner, more functional, faster and more maintainable.

The main thing holding back adoption into gnulib master at the moment
seems to be that (as a complete rewrite) it introduces a lot of new code
and can't be reviewed one feature at a time.  I live in hope that if I
am able to drive successful adoption in a selection of existing GNU
projects, maybe this will give the gnulib folks confidence that it is
working as advertised. (I actually wrote it for M4 and Libtool, but I've
had very little time for M4 recently, and I burnt myself out on Libtool
last year, so I'm working on fun projects again for a while before I
approach it again.  In the process I also came up with bootstrap.conf
files that would make adopting the new bootstrap into coreutils, bison,
tar and m4 a no-brainer. But I digress.)

Among many of the nice features not present in the current gnulib version
are that it will create a git submodule for gnulib (see --help output),
and knows how to --skip-git updates.  Plus it runs about 30% faster, even
though it has twice as many lines of code!

  git checkout topic/sane-bootstrap

should do the trick if I made the right git incantations.  If you decide
to merge, I'll also apply it to the Lua branch, although it's much less
important there, it's nice to keep everything consistent until we retire
one branch or the other.

In the process of doing this, I found a whole pile of small cleanups, not
least of which was that I wasn't able to bootstrap a freshly cloned
working tree from the repository using either script until I patched a
few things up.  Hopefully, all the patches I pushed to master are self-
explanatory.

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)