Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Managing changes to projects that use autoconf/automake with tla

[Miles Bader]

On Mon, Apr 05, 2004 at 09:25:00AM -0700, Tom Lord wrote:
> The GNU project has a coding standard that says you should distribute
> projects with such files already there so that, for example, users
> don't need to have autoconf/automake in order to build a package.
> (Which is a nice theory that doesn't work out in practice all that
> well, but that's anothe story.)

Eh?  It works great in my experience (there used to be some problems if
timestamps got changed in transport, and the Makefile tried to re-autoconf
things, but AFAIK this is pretty much solved by `maintainer mode' these
days).

> Consequently, projects like GCC keep generated files under revision control
> and even advise contributors to expect pointless merge-conflicts when
> updating their trees after rebuilding the generated files.

I think this is silly of them.  CVS HEAD is not an ordinary distribution, and
people checking out CVS copies are not ordinary users; requiring them to have
auto-tools installed doesn't seem like much of an issue (especially these
days).

I agree with everyone saying that one just shouldn't keep generated files in
the archive, and should add the generated file names to the precious regexp
(I always build in a separate build dir, but allowing same-tree builds is a
nice convenience for some people, as long as the effort isn't too great, and
certainly modifying the precious regexp is not a big effort).

BTW, I've always wanted to ask this: why is the build-dir name you always
recommend `=build' instead of `+build' (thus requiring a special case in
=tagging-method)...?

> I still want to say "don't use auto*" but, of course, that's not
> always an option.   

Yeah, but what other option is there?  Sure the auto* tools suck big time --
it's just that everything else sucks[*] more...

[*] though the method of sucking may differ

-Miles
-- 
"Most attacks seem to take place at night, during a rainstorm, uphill,
 where four map sheets join."   -- Anon. British Officer in WW I