Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Bootstrapping theory and practice (re Alfred)

[Alfred M\. Szmidt]

   The circularity is a bug on principle and in forseeable, time
   critical, life critical practice.  What happens when the cycle
   breaks?  When someone needs to get stuff working but is faced with
   a busted shell /and/ a busted M4?

Same thing that happens when the bootstrap compiler in GCC breaks, and
you end up fixing it.

   And it's not like it's that damn hard or expensive.  You pick a
   bootstrapping environment above which applications reside and below
   that you build a tower whose foundation is the raw-iron-du-jour.

I agree, but then you'd kinda need to ditch the whole GNU project into
a trashcan, and start over (maybe reusing existing code).  Simply not
a option, so it is better to do this in a evolutionary manner.

   The GNU project's success would hardly have been impeded by
   treating a GNU shell (not necessarily bash) and GNU Make as prereqs
   for everything else.

Not bash, please... scheme or something, but not bash...

   If Autoconf were never anything more than the tool used to build a
   GNU shell, GNU make, and maybe a portability library, I would have
   far less reason to complain.

Here we touch something that has already been touched, most GNU tools
were written on many different platforms, hence why you really really
wan't to have something that checks for various platform specific
hacks and work around them.