what to do about gnulib

[Andy Wingo]

Hi,

I am not sure what to do about gnulib.

To recap, gnulib provides compile-time shims for "foreign" or
out-of-date target systems that allows Guile to program to a single
POSIX + GNU API and not worry too much about what the system actually
offers.  It is never installed; instead it includes the `gnulib-tool`
utility to update the in-tree copy of gnulib, for a selected set of
modules.

So far, so good.  However I was unable to update gnulib before the most
recent release.  The reason is essentially the problem described in this
issue:

  https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30051

To wit, running "autoreconf -vif" invokes the "autopoint" tool supplied
by installed gettext, which copies over .m4 files from installed
gettext, but these files are older than the ones that are already
"vendored" in-tree by gnulib.  Other parts of gnulib depend on the newer
gnulib-supplied macros which were stompled over; autoconf thus fails to
run.

So, I can't update gnulib right now.  Not a great situation.  The
options, as I understand them:

  1. Some projects (e.g. poke) seem to import the whole of gnulib as a
     git submodule, and then run "gnulib-tool --update" from that
     submodule as part of their bootstrap.  In this way the stompled
     files are restored.  However I do not want git submodules in Guile;
     they add additional steps for every time you change to a different
     HEAD, and I know from experience that I can't rely on myself to
     perform them all, much less any user with a bug report.  Do not
     want.

  2. Same as (1), but subtree merge.  This is what we do with lightening
     and what I would like to do with Whippet, if that project works
     out.  But gnulib is big; a checkout is 200 MB of data + 130 MB git
     repo.

  ** Note, for (1) and (2), if you wanted to preserve the ability to
     bootstrap from a tarball, you'd have to include gnulib in the
     tarball.  Of course you could argue that if you are not gnulib-tool
     --update'ing, are you really bootstrapping?  I don't know the
     answer.  ***

  3. Fix autopoint to not overwrite newer m4 files with its copies.  I
     don't know?

  4. Fix installed gettext to not define gl_ macros ?  That would make
     it so that it won't stomple on a local gnulib copy.  I don't know
     though.

  5. Update to whatever version of gnulib is the latest without this
     change?

  6. Something else?  Stop using gnulib?

I am not a gnulib wizard and would appreciate any thoughts :)  Cc'ing
Bruno as he is the expert.  Really I would like to avoid gnulib-tool
--update in Guile's bootstrap and just keep things like it is.  Of
course I could be being unreasonable.

Cheers,

Andy