-GNULib is intended to be the canonical source for most of the important
-"Portability" files for GNU projects.
+Gnulib is intended to be the canonical source for most of the important
+"portability" and/or common files for GNU projects. These are files
+intended to be shared at the source level; Gnulib is not a library meant
+to be installed and linked against. Unlike most projects, Gnulib does
+not normally generate a source tarball distribution; instead, developers
+should just grab modules directly from the repository.