bug#63331: Guile-GnuTLS/Git circular dependency

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Vivien Kraus <vivien@planete-kraus.eu> skribis:

> Le samedi 06 mai 2023 à 19:20 +0200, Ludovic Courtès a écrit :
>> We need to solve that.  For now, the only fix I can think of is
>> having
>> ‘guile-gnutls’ built from a “make dist”-provided tarballs. 
>> Apparently
>> we can add assets at <https://gitlab.com/gnutls/guile/-/tags>; would
>> you
>> like to upload a tarball and accompanying signature, Simon?
>
> If the problem is with git-download, couldn’t we just use a "git-
> archive"-provided tarball, and keep the bootstrapping process? Or are
> there further dependencies with the autotools that require a dist-
> provided tarball?

The ‘gnulib’ package also uses ‘git-fetch’, so we’d at least need to get
rid of it.

More importantly, tarballs generated by GitLab & co. are usually built
on the fly and change over time (details about the tarball headers
etc. may change).  So we cannot depend them.

A tarball produced with ‘make dist’ will have everything we need,
including Gnulib.

Ludo’.