Re: gnulib is no longer an hg subrepo

[John W. Eaton]

On 1/26/20 6:34 AM, "Markus Mützel" wrote:
> Am 24. Januar 2020 um 15:44 Uhr schrieb "John W. Eaton":
> > After this change (on stable, merged with default):
> >
> >     http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/ece72b94486f
> >
> > the gnulib sources are no longer managed within the Octave mercurial
> > archive as an hg subrepo.  Instead, we now have the bootstrap script
> > fetching a copy of gnulib using git.
>
> Thank you very much for that change. That will probably make updating gnulib a 
> lot easier in the future.
>
> > After updating the Octave sources to get this change you will need to
> > remove the gnulib subdirectory in your source tree and run bootstrap to
> > pull a new copy of gnulib from upstream (commands executed at the
> > top-level of the Octave source tree):
> >
> >     hg pull -u
> >     rm -rf gnulib
> >     ./bootstrap
>
> The MXE Octave buildbots (native and Windows cross-builds) seem to be failing 
> since that change.
> Maybe the octave-hg-repo (or at least the gnulib subdirectory) needs to be 
> cleared once on the workers, too?

I removed the gnulib directories from the source trees on the buildbot 
systems that I manage.  I think they should work now.  I also restarted 
the buildbot worker process on three of the four systems I manage.  I 
think they were disabled after recent upgrades.  Things should be back 
to normal soon.

To make updating gnulib easier for us, I think we will need to come up 
with some solution in the bootstrap script so that it will automatically 
fetch new changes for gnulib.  Otherwise, we will have to manually 
update the gnulib sources when we change GNULIB_REVISION in 
bootstrap.conf.  This will require some coordination with the gnulib 
folks.  I looked at it but couldn't decide the right thing to do.  I 
might be wrong, but it looks like the update will already happen if 
gnulib is a git subrepo.  Otherwise, fetching new changes doesn't 
happen.  Should that always happen, even if the GNULIB_SRCDIR is set? 
Should a failed fetch be fatal by default?  Maybe you are not on the 
network or don't have permission to write to a shared gnulib source 
tree.  If it is fatal by default, then there should probably be an 
option to allow skipping that step.  Too many twists and turns.  I gave 
up.  Would someone like to take up this cause and try to make bootstrap 
do the right thing for us?

jwe