gnulib unnecessarily enforces git as requirement

[Benjamin Lindner]

Hello list,

Octave (http://www.octave.org) utilizes gnulib and a recent change in
gnulib breaks the build for MinGW platform, because gnulib now
enforces git to be available at bootstrap stage.
The change was introduced in a patch discussed in the following thread:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2010-11/msg00148.html

I am using msys as build environment and git is not available there.
However - and this is the issue the report is about - git itself is
not required for bootstrapping gnulib.
What I do is
  - download the gnulib sources as .tgz tarball from the git
repository webpage and unzip
  - invoke the bootstrap script as 'bootstrap
--gnulib-srcdir=path/to/gnulib --skip-po --copy'

This currently yields the error

 bootstrapping...
 Error: 'git' not found

 Please install the prerequisite programs

However, simply removing the line from bootstrap.conf as

diff --git a/bootstrap.conf b/bootstrap.conf
  --- a/bootstrap.conf
  +++ b/bootstrap.conf
  @@ -106,7 +106,6 @@
   buildreq="\
   autoconf   2.59
   automake   1.9.6
  -git        1.5.5
   tar        -
   "
   checkout_only_file=HACKING

allows a clean bootstrap process.
So obviously, git is never used in the bootstrap script, but is is
enforced as a requirement - which is contradictive.

regards,
benjamin