On Jul 7, 2009, at 4:14, Sam Varshavchik <mrsam(a)courier-mta.com> wrote:
Richard W.M. Jones writes:
> On Mon, Jul 06, 2009 at 11:09:51PM -0400, Braden McDaniel wrote:
>> 2. improves the resiliency of the package build to changes to
>> Fedora's autotools chain.
> Many projects come with public source repositories, and those don't
> include the binary configure/Makefile.in files. You usually build
> those locally with a script like 'autogen.sh'. Projects that depend
> on precise versions of the autotools are just going to break under
> those conditions.
Bingo. Which is why this is a rather strange (not my first, or the
second, or the nth choice, but I had to spend a few minutes here
picking the correct adjective that expresses the general idea, but
is still somewhat diplomatic) way to publish source. And, which is
why this is somewhat of a rarity, and a novelty.
> libguestfs is a case in point - the Debian maintainer builds it from
> git using some unknown version of autoconf, and I build it on RHEL
> and
This is a rare exception. For each project you can cite that
releases their sources this way, I'll be happy to cite twenty others
who don't.
Feel free to come up with your largest list. I'll just go through
Sourceforge, and grab the first x*20 projects, in response.
Given that automake's "make dist" automatically rolls Makefile.in,
and configure into the tarball (together with a bunch of other
stuff), one has to go out of their way to leave them out of the
tarball.
Bizarre.
These days distributing via tarball is bizarre. Distributed source
control is changing the way that projects work and release. Sure there
are plenty of projects out here that don't work this way but more and
more are headed in this direction.
--
Jes