Made some changes to the way “jhbuild bootstrap” works. Whereas previously bootstrap would check to see if each required build tool was installed by the distro and only build the tools that were missing, it now builds all the tools.
If you wish to use the build tools supplied by your distro, it is now recommended that you don’t run bootstrap. To perform the “check that required tools are installed” job that bootstrap used to do, you can instead run the “jhbuild sanitycheck” command, which will do these checks and report any errors. The sanitycheck command also checks for other configuration problems as well, such as whether the all the different automake versions will be able to find the libtool macros.
The upside for me is that there are now only 2 combinations of distro packages vs. packages installed by jhbuild, as opposed to the 2n combinations previously (where n is the number of bootstrap packages). This greatly reduces the number of ways someone can screw up their system.
Since bootstrap is a lot simpler now, I also changed how it was implemented. Rather than using a separate code path, it now uses the same build framework as the main build. The bootstrap command is now functionally equivalent to building meta-bootstrap from the bootstrap module set. Changing the list of bootstrap packages can now be done as easily as modifying any other module set.
Removing the redundant code path should make things a little more robust, since it reduces the amount of infrequently used and/or untested code.