Re: [Bug-zile] Building lrex-gnu.so on Mac OS

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi Brian,

On 13 Aug 2011, at 11:07, Brian Maher wrote:
> Thanks for the patch Gary,

You're welcome.  Sorry it took me so long.

> is there any reason why we don't just check
> in the files generated by gnulib-tool?

There are a few projects that like to do that (apparently, I haven't actually
seen one myself!).

But, I am firmly in the camp of not checking in generated files. This is for
a few reasons, not limited to:

  1. when the generator revs, it may very well change all of the files it
     generates subtly - causing a "noisy" check in of all the files that
     were tweaked
  2. if various people with commit bits run different versions of the tools,
     you then need they each have valid but different versions of the checked
     in files, and end up changing them back and forth with different commits
     (i.e. I use Homebrew, which doesn't package Autotools, so I'm using
     the old revisions shipped by Apple, where Reuben uses Linux (AFAICT!) and
     has the latest releases of Autotools)
  3. there are a ton of gnulib files (on master at least) that would need
     checking in, so we'd need regular maintenance commits of the updated files
     as all the gnulib devs are working on their code

> The documentation seems to
> indicate that as the preferred way of distribution the files:
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/s/gnulib/

On that page?  In all the gnulib-using projects I track (libtool, m4, coreutils,
bison, tar, zile), the maintainers have a bootstrap or autogen.sh script to
add to a git checkout tree all the files you'd normally get in an unpacked
distribution tarball.  I can't see anything that suggests doing otherwise.

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)