I personally thought for a while that automake should drop the
dependency on the release scripts from gnulib,
What I remember along these lines is suggesting having automake not use
wget to get texinfo.tex and other such files over the web (because
getting things over the web from savannah is not a good idea nowadays),
but to assume a git checkout of gnulib and cp them. And that you didn't
like that idea. And I didn't like the git submodule idea that you
proposed in return. So here we are :).
If I remember correctly, Karl objected;
Yes, because automake needs to keep distributing the "third party" files
it has always distributed. So far as I can see, it would just cause
unnecessary hassle for everyone to change anything now.
perhaps he could suggest another course of action (also in CC).
I'll changing my updating of texinfo.tex in gnulib to the latest
released version. I seem to recall having done it that way before, and
then either reverting somehow or people actually wanting the development
version. It has never been a problem before. We were just unlucky.
Anyway, I would not make another release of automake *just* for this
(how hard is it to download one file), but we (= you, sorry) could aim
for another release sooner rather than later, maybe with another simple
fix/enhancement or two, like the ones you already made. --thanks, karl.
