Re: [ft-devel] .gitignore in release tarballs

[Miles Bader]

Marek Kasik <address@hidden> writes:
> OK, I just thought that you don't want git specific files there since
> you've removed git specific directories.
> I'll workaround it in freetype's spec file.

Obviously they are specialized files, and won't be useful to many
people downloading the tarball.  However, they are source files, in
the sense that they add useful, and unique information that cannot be
recreated automatically.

It would be perfectly reasonable, for instance, for somebody to commit
the contents of a release tarball to a local git archive (maybe as
part of a larger project); for such people, it would be helpful to
have these files which somebody already went to the trouble of
writing.  [Sure, for those that use a non-git source-control system,
they can't be used directly -- but in many cases, the information is
still valuable, and can be simply copied/tweaked for the
source-control system used.]

Of course this isn't particularly _crucial_ information, and whether
they're included or considered "noise to be removed in the tarball" is
mostly a matter of maintainer taste -- but for the same reason, a
build system probably shouldn't be warning about their presence...

-Miles

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