Making a case for ".cvsignore" again ;-)

[Tommy Reynolds]

Hello, All!

The new packaging technology Stickster and I are completing is based
on keeping all of the meta-information about a document (authors,
license, changelog and such) in a separate file "rpm-info.xml".  This
will make it much easier to keep the <articleinfo>; <bookinfo>; RPM
spec file; and changelogs all in sync.

There is a DTD file in "docs-common/packaging/rpm-info.dtd" 
that defines how this file is to be constructed.

A new language-specific file, "fdp-info-${LANG}.xml", will be
generated based on the "rpm-info.xml" file. It will contain the
<articleinfo> or <bookinfo> content.  The base document will then
include the "fdp-info-${LANG}.xml" file using an entity reference.

The "Makefile.common" rules will generate this file any time
"rpm-info.xml" is changed.

Every document will have the following file dependency chain:

rpm-info.xml ==> fdp-info-${LANG}.xml ==> document-${LANG}/index.html

The "rpm-info.xml" file gets manually updated, the
"fdp-info-${LANG}.xml" file gets rebuilt and then the document is
rebuilt.

My recommendation is that the "fdp-info-${LANG}.xml" files NOT be
archived in CVS.  They are derivative files and archiving them in CVS
may mess up the file timestamps such that after a "cvs update" the
document may not rebuild correctly.

I think this is a job for ".cvsignore", to prevent the inadvertent
archiving of these files:

========= .cvsignore =============
fdp-info-*.xml
==================================

should do the trick.  Then even if an "fdp-info-${LANG}.xml" file
gets archived, CVS will simply ignore the archived version on updates
and ignore the local version on commits.

There has been prior resistance to having a ".cvsignore" file in the
CVS archive itself (although having your own local one is just fine),
but this may require more thought.  I like the idea of having this 
preventative file in CVS.

What do others prefer?

Cheers
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