Re: bootstrap vs. autogen.sh

[Rik]

On 09/18/2012 12:02 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 14-Sep-2012, Rik wrote:
>
> | We might consider renaming the autogen.sh script to bootstrap.  According to
> | the GNU Automake manual, bootstrap is preferred these days although plenty 
> of
> | projects are still using the old name.
>
> Our autogen.sh calls the gnulib bootstrap script.  Will there be
> confusion if we have a top-level bootstrap script and a
> build-aux/bootstrap script?
I wouldn't necessarily think so.  People are much more likely to encounter
bootstrap at the top-level then to go searching in build-aux and find that
one.  And we do have repeating names such as the operators/ directories in
libinterp and in liboctave.  It is understood that they are different
because they are in different places in the hierarchy.  In that sense I
don't think people would be confused by having two bootstraps.  Another
option, since we manually update the bootstrap script in build-aux, would
be to rename it to something explicit such as bootstrap_gnulib.  Our
bootstrap script would then call bootstrap_gnulib and it would be quite
clear what is happening.
>   I don't think we can use the gnulib
> bootstrap script by itself since our autogen.sh does more than the
> gnulib bootstrap script alone.
I agree.  We need to keep our script in addition to the gnulib one.

--Rik