Re: [bug-inetutils] Present release goals

[Simon Josefsson]

Mats Erik Andersson <address@hidden> writes:

> tisdag den 18 oktober 2011 klockan 20:10 skrev Alfred M. Szmidt detta:
>>       1) "ftpd/ftpcmd.c" is never removed by the target "distclean";
>>       thus is never regenerated by Bison, once the file already is
>>       present.
>> 
>> That is as it should be, we don't want to require bison to compile
>> inetutils.  There is a target called maintainer-clean which will clean
>> out any files not part of the "source tree".
>> 
>> GNU Bison is required to generate ftpcmd.c.  But we should have a
>> better check for it when the corresponding .c file doesn't exist, and
>> bail out early.
>
> This ought to mean two things:
>
>   * Bootstrapping is presently not sufficient to produce a usable
>     source distribution.

I don't think this is in general never true -- in general you need to
bootstrap + configure + make dist in order to guarantee that the build
tree is usable.  There can be many things that is needed in a source
distribution that are built (e.g., documentation), although InetUtils is
relatively simply today.

> Thus my reported build problem for OpenBSD and FreeBSD seem to be
> due to a change in my habits to move the source tree from my main
> development system in GNU/Linux to my secondary systems for porting.
> This is comforting for us to know and for me to understand.

Moving live trees between systems is often fragile and can lead to
difficult to debug issues.

/Simon