Re: CVS Guile and configure, Makefile.in, and other auxiliary files...

[Neil Jerram]

Lars J. Aas writes:

   On Wed, Oct 04, 2000 at 09:10:39PM +0200, Marius Vollmer wrote:
   : "Lars J. Aas" <address@hidden> writes:
   : 
   : > I'd like to try out Guile from the CVS repository.  Because I'm
   : > mostly doing work with Autoconf 2.49b (CVS), Automake 1.4a (CVS),
   : > I've scrapped the older, buggier, less portable versions of those
   : > tools...  This makes it of course impossible to bootstrap the
   : > Guile CVS repository.
   : 
   : Why?  Are there bugs in our configure stuff?

   I won't call it bugs - lets just say that CVS Autoconf and Automake haven't
   managed to stay backwards compatible:

So perhaps it's a strategic error on the part of Autoconf?

Seriously though, I've also found it a pain to have these
autogenerated files in the repository.  It makes it that much harder
to see what you have really changed, if `cvs diff' keeps showing you
spurious Makefile.in and configure diffs just because you have
different versions of the auto* tools.

I don't think it would be unreasonable to require maintainers and
developers to use the latest *released* versions of these tools, and
then to fix Makefile.am and configure.in as necessary.  For me, at
least, upgrading tools would be preferable to superfluous files in the
repository.

(BTW, thanks Marius for removing the Makefile.in's from guile-doc.)

Regards,

        Neil