Re: Files from gnulib

[Stefan Monnier]

> Based on the experience from GDB, here are the problems with this
> approach:

>   . The remapping of file names cannot be fully automated.  Once all
>     limits on file names are removed ("we don't want even the
>     slightest impediment", says Jim), sooner or later you get to the
>     point where the number of files to be renamed becomes large and a
>     human needs to define how files will be renamed, because you want
>     names that at least remotely resemble the original ones, but still
>     don't clash in the 8+3 namespace.  (I hope no one is seriously
>     entertaining the idea of producing meaningless names like
>     foo~123.c or ABC123EF.c, from some hash or whatever).

Yes, I was assuming that there would still be few files, and that the
renaming would be human-controlled (but the make-dist script signals an
error if the human-provided rules don't cover all cases).  So it
wouldn't help for cases like CEDET.

>   . Once the remapping is maintained by humans, it becomes unreliable.

Why is that?

>   . The unpacking instructions are part of the tarball, and need to be
>     extracted separately before the "main" extraction begins.  More
>     importantly, the remapping file needs to be extracted before that
>     as well.  This makes the entire unpacking procedure extremely
>     complicated and thus error-prone, except if the person who does
>     that is the one who designed it and wrote the instructions in the
>     first place.

Rather than distribute a file that needs to be passed to djtar, I was
thinking of distributing a script tailored to MS-DOS, run instead of
djtar, and which would run djtar insternally.  So this script can
provide the instructions.

> In addition, there will be a need to deal with something that the GDB
> distribution doesn't.  In GDB, the files that are renamed during
> unpacking are only those that are not used for the DOS build.  By
> contrast, here we want to rename files that are used during the build.

Yes, that's a much bigger problem.

In the mean time, please rename the files, thank you,


        Stefan