Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Online book for usability

[Andrew Suffield]

On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 11:10:41AM -0700, Tom Lord wrote:
>     > Could people please explain whence that feeling that building in your
>     > working tree is sinful?
> 
> That's an over-beers thing.   It's lots of experience and rules of
> thumb that converge on that.   A very short clue might be gained by
> observing that the GNU Makefile coding conventions call for two
> make targets:
> 
>       make distclean --- remove all configure and build-products
>         make dist -- tar up just the source, nothing else
> 
> With those conventions, GNU admits that once you rely on in-tree
> builds, you're trees become so hard to manage that familiar tasks
> which can normally be carried out with generic tools (like tar and
> find) suddenly require special tools, implemented just for that tree,
> and constantly maintained along with the tree.
> 
> (At least with `inventory' operations like `make distclean' and `make
> dist' become generic: you can implement them just once, trivially, so
> that they work for all trees that use `inventory' reasonably.)

This is essentially wrong in general; I don't have any projects where
'inventory' does the same thing as 'make dist'. Nor do I have any
projects where 'make distclean' does the same thing as 'inventory -pbj
| xargs rm'.

There are subtle but significant differences between the two. The set
of files which are stored in the archive, and the set of files which
are distributed in tarballs, are similar but distinct.

distclean and dist are here because *building a distribution tarball
requires building some files to go in it*, not because there might be
some unrelated files in the same tree. They're in the GNU conventions
because GNU encourages this behaviour, especially for things like
bison.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
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