Re: gnulib-tool.py consider automake_subdir=false support

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Mitch,

> I hope to have some semi-quality patches to submit soon enough.
> ...
> I do see sed being used in a few other places.  Of
> course I could likely put a patch together to emulate that in python as
> well.

It's nice that you consider enhancing gnulib-tool.py. But don't underestimate
the task:
  - It's less about hacking than about testing. For every change that one
    makes in gnulib-tool.py, one needs to prepare a module or Makefile.am
    for testing it, run gnulib-tool and gnulib-tool.py with the same options,
    and compare the results.
  - Last time I worked on syncing gnulib-tool.py with gnulib-tool (in August
    2022), I noticed that there's still at least 1 man-month of work to be
    done.

> I have been very grateful for gnulib-tool.py as it results in some massive
> bootstrap speed improvements (over 10x) on Windows.

In which environment did you make these measurements? Cygwin? MSYS2? WSL?
I would expect that WSL is faster than Cygwin or MSYS2 regarding process
forking and shell script execution.

On Unix, gnulib-tool.py is only about 2-3x as fast as gnulib-tool.

You could consider installing a Linux distro and using that for running
gnulib-tool.

Bruno