Re: Hidden files in autoconf 2.70 distribution?

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 9 Dec 2020, Bruce Korb wrote:

> Tho the instance is particular to gnulib, it is of a more general interest, 
> too.

Yes.  I have always been against approaches which tie release tarballs 
to the version control system used since this would created dependency 
and make some people more equal than others.  Release tarballs are a 
product of the version control system and the release process but it 
seems wrong for the tarball to contain additional content as an 
artifact of the version control system or the process used.

Any end user should be able to pick up the contents of a tarball and 
do 'make dist' and 'make distcheck' based only on the contents of the 
release tarball and without access to the original version control 
system.  Hopefully this is still the case.

Bob

> On 12/9/20 6:21 AM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> > This conversation should happen on the Gnulib mailing list; both
> > git-version-gen and maint.mk are maintained there.  I have no
> > particular opinion about whether it is appropriate to use dot-files
> > for this purpose.
> >
> > (Context that got trimmed off the top: Bob is concerned about the
> > files named ".prev-version", ".version", and ".tarball-version" in the
> > autoconf 2.70 release tarball.)

--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
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