Re: split bootstrap in two phases

[Simon Josefsson]

Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> writes:

> Hi all 'bootstrap' users,
>
> Over the last few years, it has become more and more clear that bootstrap
> does two things:
>   (1) Fetch auxiliary files that are not in the git checkout.
>       This is the part that requires network access and that has
>       supply-chain concerns.
>   (2) Generate files such as configure, config.h, Makefile.in etc.
>       This includes running gnulib-tool.
>
> Recent discussion in gnu-prog-discuss has shown that making the separation
> into two phases (1) and (2) explicit will have several benefits:
>
>   * For reproducible builds, it is necessary to be execute the second
>     phase without the first one.
>
>   * For people who have local modifications in dependency packages
>     (e.g. in gnulib), or for distros who want to apply patches to .m4 files,
>     it is important to have these phases separated.
>
>   * The second phase is a way for people to regenerate files in a
>     supported way. So far, too many users have been running 'autoreconf -fvi',
>     which many GNU packages don't support.

To replace the use of 'autoreconf -fvi', doesn't (at least) the
autogen.sh script needs to be EXTRA_DIST'ed?  How should this be
achieved?  Probably some end-user documentation snippet about this
should be available.

It would be nice if Debian would then use ./autogen.sh instead of
autoreconf -fvi to re-generated all generated files from the tarball.
But the first step is to ship it.

/Simon

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