Follow-up Comment #6, bug #17794 (project coreutils): If it serves as any reference point, M4 1.4.6 includes its bootstrap in its tarball. Someone using the tarball is expected to neither run bootstrap nor to run autoreconf (a fact that automake checks during 'make distcheck'), but the files are still shipped should they choose to rather than forcing them to check m4 out from CVS, similar to how configure.ac or Makefile.am is included in the tarball. On the other hand, running bootstrap implies that you have checked out gnulib from CVS, so omitting bootstrap from the tarball isn't too severe because by the time a user has grabbed gnulib from CVS, they can go all the way grab the bootstrap script and rest of the package from CVS as well.
As to the original report, running autoreconf on a package without first checking whether it works without modifications is risky. The fact that it triggered a failure here should not come as a surprise, because it is not recommended practice; indeed, coreutils 6.2 depends on files that are newer than what gettext 0.15 provides, but gettext 0.15.1 has not yet been released, so autoreconf alone is helpless to do the job correctly. But maybe there is a bug report against gettext here, for the fact that autopoint blindly replaces macros to older versions rather than trusting that a newer version of the macro does not need to be downgraded to what that macro used to be at the time of the gettext release. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?17794> _______________________________________________ Message sent via/by Savannah http://savannah.gnu.org/ _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils