Bootstrapping and autotools

[Richard Purdie]

On Fri, 2024-04-19 at 00:11 +0200, kpcyrd wrote:
> does somebody know what the bootstrapping status of autotools is?
> 
> Also, is something considered "bootstrapped from source" if the build
> is making use of a pre-generated `./configure` script that is 25k
> lines long?
> 
> In my opinion something is only "bootstrapped from source" if
> autoreconf is used as part of the build instead of executing some
> pre-compiled `./configure` script. This however means that, to
> compile bash, one needs to compile autotools first.

FWIW Yocto Project/OpenEmbedded autoreconf pretty much everything we
can. We bootstrap our own autoconf/automake native tools too. To do
that you effectively need m4, perl and gnu-config and we assume perl
from the host system.

Cheers,

Richard