On Tue, Aug 15, 2023 at 07:01:42PM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote: > On 2023-08-14 11:01, Gavin Smith wrote: > > > It makes no sense to include the Info cross-reference beginning "*note" > > in a plain text file > > Thanks, fixed by installing the attached into Autoconf and propagating it > into Gnulib. This is an improvement, but there are still a couple left (made with @ref). In the future, we should change Texinfo --plaintext output not to use the *note syntax (CC-ing bug-texinfo@xxxxxxx). > > Using ASCII quotes, like 'README', would be just as good here. > > I think the switch from ASCII came because Texinfo 7 defaults to UTF-8. > > To cater to any builders inconvenienced by UTF-8, a developer can ship the > contents of INSTALL.ISO instead. As most builders moved on to UTF-8 some > time ago, it should be OK for INSTALL itself to use it. Thanks, I didn't see that file. It would make sense to use "INSTALL.ISO" as INSTALL in packages. > > * A "bootstrap" command is recommended as the first step: > > > > The following shell commands: > > test -f configure || ./bootstrap > > ./configure > > make > > make install > > should configure, build, and install this package. > > > > However, a "bootstrap" command does not exist in all packages (and isn't > > specified by the GNU coding standards(*)), making this INSTALL file less > > useful to include in other packages. > > It should be OK, as ‘test -f configure || ./bootstrap’ should work on any > package following the GNU coding standards, even if there is no ‘bootstrap’. > The attached patch tries to clarify this point. This is a big improvement, making it clearer that the bootstrapping step is optional and improving the flow of the text. > > The ./bootstrap approach is increasingly popular, which is why we recently > updated the Autoconf manual to cover it. I appreciate it is worth mentioning. In the Texinfo package, the script is called "autogen.sh". I doubt that it offers more "fine-grained control" (as stated in the current text of INSTALL) but appears to be just another name for this script. Is there any consistency in naming across different packages, i.e. is "bootstrap" the most widely used name?
