Bernhard Voelker <mail@bernhard-voelker.de> writes:

> On 5/12/21 7:58 PM, Simon Josefsson via Gnulib discussion list wrote:
>> It would be nice to write a 'join' replacement for gnulib-tool, as that
>> is the only thing that needs coreutils for bootstrapping libidn2 on
>> alpine.  But it is not important, and with your patch things work as
>> good as they can do both with and without coreutils installed.
>
> I'm wondering if we have a list of supported platforms for maintainers
> vs. that of end users.  I mean I wouldn't bother if 'bootstrap' fails
> on some platform - actually often such platforms lack other
> prerequisites as well -, and instead I usually use distribution
> tarballs for pre-release testing ... like the end users do.

The manual contains some notes:

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Target-Platforms.html
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Supported-Platforms.html

However I think it refers to platforms on which you would build the
tarball, not the platform you would do development on.  The best we have
for the latter is this one:

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/tree/DEPENDENCIES

Ironically, it does not mention 'join' but mention a lot of other tools.

However I think these lists often become outdated.  In my view, to claim
that a platform is supported by a software project, you should have
continous building for the platform.  Otherwise support is reactive and
tends to be spurious.

/Simon