release procedure

[Peter O'Gorman]

Hi,

For some reason our release procedure calls for running make distcheck 5 
times. This is a tad onerous (one make distcheck takes almost an hour on 
my system).

HACKING asks for:
* Run `make distcheck'
  and `make distcheck DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS=--disable-ltdl-install'
  and `make distcheck DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS=--program-prefix=g'
  and `make distcheck CC=g++'

then later:
* Run `make -fMakefile.maint git-dist' (which also runs make distcheck).

Seriously, wtf?

I suggest that just the first two would be adequate.

We also fetch latest config* and some automake files from git/cvs. These 
files are all included in automake releases, what's wrong with just 
using the automake versions. Ralf releases automake fairly regularly ...

If we must continue to fetch (I did not do so for todays release because 
when I tried I got test failures in make check/distcheck etc.), then we 
need to change the Makefile to use git for the config project.

Why on earth do we have a commit script that just provides an opaque 
interface to git?

Let's just use gnuupload from gnulib to upload the tarballs. Maintaining 
our own system is silly.

I think that's about all, I will provide patches for HACKING and 
Makefile.maint later.

Peter
--
Peter O'Gorman
http://pogma.com