Re: INSTALL nits

Hi Zack,

On 17/8/23 23:41, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 17, 2023, at 9:13 AM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
>> On Thu, 17 Aug 2023, Gavin Smith wrote:
>>> Is there any consistency in naming across different packages, i.e.
>>> is "bootstrap" the most widely used name?
>> No, there is no consistency across different packages.  If this was
>> part of the GNU coding standards then perhaps actual GNU projects
>> might be convinced to use a standard name.  But most consumers of
>> Autoconf are not GNU projects.
> On a related note, I had thought the very long term plan was to make
> it so most projects only needed to run `autoreconf -i` before `configure`
> when building from a VCS checkout.  That "most" can't ever be "all",
> because there will always be weird special cases -- look at Autoconf
> and Automake themselves -- but I can at least *imagine* a world in
> which *only* Autoconf and Automake themselves are weird special cases.
> What are the most common things people need to do in a "bootstrap"
> script that *aren't* covered by `autoreconf -i`?
>
I have a couple of bootstrap scripts that generate automake snippets 
that are included into Makefile.am. If autoreconf is guaranteed to run 
autoconf before automake, I suppose those snippets could be generated 
within autoconf via m4_syscom or similar.

Cheers,

Peter