[Monotone-devel] Re: [Monotone-debian] net.venge.monotone.debian-diff proposed policy

[Richard Levitte]

In message <address@hidden> on Fri, 03 Aug 2007 22:23:05 +0200, Ludovic Brenta 
<address@hidden> said:

ludovic> I think the origin of the problem is that the files generated
ludovic> by autoreconf are in the release tarball,

That's normal behavior according to GNU standards, which we follow to
a point.

ludovic> but not in the working copy after a fresh checkout.

That, too, is normal.  A fresh checkout isn't the same thing as a
distribution, and quite honestly, I would STRONGLY ADVICE anyone not
to engage in the game of committing configure.in, configure,
config.guess or any other of the automagically generated or copied
files into any branch.  The result is usually that as soon as a few
people run different versions of the auto* tools, we get a version
battle of sorts that are 1) difficult to review and 2) a huge
distraction from what we should really review.

ludovic> How about keeping these files in the .debian-diff branch?
ludovic> That makes it possible to patch them if necessary, too.  And
ludovic> without rerunning autoreconf from debian/rules.

That makes it a pain in the nether region to patch.  There is one
package that I can't build any more, simply because it contains a
patch of configure which doesn't work because I've branched off a
little, and did the mistake of using a DIFFERENT version of the auto*
tools than the original author, which means that my branch contains a
different configure and other files that said patch can't be applied
on.  The result is that dpkg-buildpackage barfs.  I've yet to resolve
the situation, but had I not been stupid enough to commit the
automagically generated changes in those files in my branch, I
wouldn't have had a problem.  Do not follow my bad example.

Cheers,
Richard

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-- 
Richard Levitte                         address@hidden
                                        http://richard.levitte.org/

"When I became a man I put away childish things, including
 the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
                                                -- C.S. Lewis