Re: proposal to fork the build-tools projects

[Bruce Korb]

Tom Lord wrote:
> 
> * Maintaining the build tools (autoconf etc) is currently too hard.
> 
> The maintainers have to struggle to write portable shell code;....
> 
> Those constraints really matter to a small number of packages (the
> "bootstrap packages") but could be reasonably relaxed for other
> packages.

I'm not alone?

> Let's then formally identify a _subset_ of the bootstrap packages,
> which are those GNU tools that other (non-bootstrap) GNU packages are
> allowed to depend on for the build process.  For example, GNU Make
> would probably be in this subset, as would a GNU shell.  Call this set
> the "build environment packages".

To this should be added a "backfill" library.
Programmers will know that ``#include <backfill.h>''
will ensure that all the standard POSIX-isms will be defined
and ``-lbackfill'' will ensure that much of the commonly
omitted functions will be added as well.  Get rid of all
that configury testing cruft.  It'll just "be there".