Re: [screen-devel] Minor issues to avoid when building the GNU Screen release tar ball in the future

[Alex Naumov]

Hi Axel,

thank you for your kind words and also your contributing to GNU screen.
Right now we have more than 200 open issues/tasks/bugs and first I'm
going to concentrate on these.

I'm proud to help to maintain this project. I should say, I have a lot of fun :)

Yes, we plan the new release on this weekend. But about it a bit later :)
I hope you will like it.


Cheers,
Alex

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 1:33 PM, Axel Beckert <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> this is _not_ to bash Amadeusz' work on GNU Screen.
>
> In contrary: I'm very glad and thankful that he pulled GNU Screen out
> of its lethargy and maybe even attracted some new contributors. :-)
>
> And I'm also glad to see a second person (Alexander) going through
> open bug reports and applying fixes since recently.
>
> Thanks to all who contributed to GNU Screen, especially those who
> contributed only recently!
>
> There happened a few mishaps during building the 4.2.1 release tar
> ball which partially are not catchable by the build system, so I want
> to list them here, maybe as check list for the 4.3.0 tar ball
> building:
>
> * Makefile still contained the previous release version number which
>   especially breaks the "clean" target. So the common packager's
>   workflow of Apply patches → Build → Unapply Patches → Clean the
>   working directory fails.
>
>   → Please check that all occurrences (except change log, history,
>     etc.) of 4.2.0, 4.2.1 and 4.2.2 are changed to 4.3.0 before
>     building the release tar ball.
>
>   (Yes, this case wouldn't show up if the Makefile wouldn't have been
>   shipped in the release tar ball at all. See below.)
>
> * Take care that files which do not belong into a release tar ball are
>   not included.
>
>   + Cache files in the release tar ball:
>
>     autom4te.cache/output.0
>     autom4te.cache/output.1
>     autom4te.cache/requests
>     autom4te.cache/traces.0
>     autom4te.cache/traces.1
>
>   + Files generated by calling configure:
>
>     config.h
>     config.log
>     config.status
>     doc/Makefile
>     Makefile
>
>   + Editor backup files:
>
>     config.h.in~
>
>   + One more case which I noticed, because the file is included, but
>     deleted during the clean (or realclean/distclean) target:
>
>     doc/screen.info
>
>     This is likely discussable if it belongs into a release tar ball.
>     I'd say no, but I won't argue much about it. :-)
>
> Tools I find useful for such QA checks: tardiff
> (http://tardiff.coolprojects.org/) to compare the file list with the
> previous release tar ball and "als" from atool
> (http://www.nongnu.org/atool/) to comfortably check the list of
> contained files independent of the actual file format and compression
> type.
>
> Thanks for considering! All the packagers of GNU Screen will be
> thankful for clean release tar balls, I'm sure! :-)
>
> In my case I'll be able to drop these files from the packaging for
> Debian:
>
> https://sources.debian.net/src/screen/4.2.1-3/debian/README.source/
> https://sources.debian.net/src/screen/4.2.1-3/debian/patches/00-fix-version-in-Makefile.patch/
> https://sources.debian.net/src/screen/4.2.1-3/debian/clean/ (at least parts 
> of it)
>
>                 Kind regards, Axel
> --
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