an update to automake-1.11?

[Jesse Keating]

On Jul 7, 2009, at 4:14, Sam Varshavchik <mrsam at courier-mta.com> wrote:

> Richard W.M. Jones writes:
>
>> On Mon, Jul 06, 2009 at 11:09:51PM -0400, Braden McDaniel wrote:
>>>     2. improves the resiliency of the package build to changes to
>>>        Fedora's autotools chain.
>> Many projects come with public source repositories, and those don't
>> include the binary configure/Makefile.in files.  You usually build
>> those locally with a script like 'autogen.sh'.  Projects that depend
>> on precise versions of the autotools are just going to break under
>> those conditions.
>
> Bingo. Which is why this is a rather strange (not my first, or the  
> second, or the nth choice, but I had to spend a few minutes here  
> picking the correct adjective that expresses the general idea, but  
> is still somewhat diplomatic) way to publish source. And, which is  
> why this is somewhat of a rarity, and a novelty.
>
>> libguestfs is a case in point - the Debian maintainer builds it from
>> git using some unknown version of autoconf, and I build it on RHEL  
>> and
>
> This is a rare exception. For each project you can cite that  
> releases their sources this way, I'll be happy to cite twenty others  
> who don't.
>
> Feel free to come up with your largest list. I'll just go through  
> Sourceforge, and grab the first x*20 projects, in response.
>
> Given that automake's "make dist" automatically rolls Makefile.in,  
> and configure into the tarball (together with a bunch of other  
> stuff), one has to go out of their way to leave them out of the  
> tarball.
>
> Bizarre.


These days distributing via tarball is bizarre.  Distributed source  
control is changing the way that projects work and release. Sure there  
are plenty of projects out here that don't work this way but more and  
more are headed in this direction.

--
Jes
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