Why enable the dist target?

[John D. Ramsdell]

Let me give two reasons for enabling the dist target.

1. It makes it easier for those without access to the source code
   repository to provide patches.  With a distribution generated by
   make dist, small modifications to a few Makefile.am files or the
   configure.ac file are handled by the make command, which propagates
   only the required updates.  As a result, diff'ing produces a patch
   that is comparable in size to the amount of changes made to source
   files.

2. It makes it so that anyone with access to the source code
   repository can generate the same distribution, as the dist target
   alone specifies what files are to be included.  Audit 1.5.6
   included files such as auparse/test/test.log, which appear to be
   files left over from testing.

I just wanted to explain why I took the time to send recent patches.

John

[ramsdell at goo audit-1.5.6]$ cat ac.diff
--- /home/ramsdell/a.txt	2007-07-30 07:51:13.000000000 -0400
+++ c.txt	2007-07-30 12:59:59.000000000 -0400
@@ -39,24 +42,22 @@
 audit-1.5.6/auparse/test/auparse_test.ref
 audit-1.5.6/auparse/test/Makefile.am
 audit-1.5.6/auparse/test/Makefile.in
-audit-1.5.6/auparse/test/test2.log
-audit-1.5.6/auparse/test/test.log
-audit-1.5.6/auparse/test/tmp
-audit-1.5.6/auparse/test/tmp1
-audit-1.5.6/auparse/test/tmp2
 audit-1.5.6/auparse/typetab.h
 audit-1.5.6/AUTHORS
-audit-1.5.6/autogen.sh
 audit-1.5.6/bindings/
 audit-1.5.6/bindings/Makefile.am
+audit-1.5.6/bindings/Makefile.in
 audit-1.5.6/bindings/python/
 audit-1.5.6/bindings/python/auparse_python.c
 audit-1.5.6/bindings/python/Makefile.am
+audit-1.5.6/bindings/python/Makefile.in
 audit-1.5.6/bindings/python/setup.py
 audit-1.5.6/ChangeLog
 audit-1.5.6/compile
 audit-1.5.6/config.guess
+audit-1.5.6/config.h.in
 audit-1.5.6/config.sub
+audit-1.5.6/configure
 audit-1.5.6/configure.ac
 audit-1.5.6/contrib/
 audit-1.5.6/contrib/avc_snap