[vos-d] build system reviews (long)

[Reed Hedges]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 11:07:11PM -0400, Peter Amstutz wrote:
> It's actually "make distcheck" that's interesting in this case.  In 
> automake it gives you a single command that will build a source tarball, 
> unpack it to another directory, runs configure and does a build.  It's a 
> very useful automated sanity check on your source distribution.  Also 
> "make dist" is distinguished from simply dumping your repository to a 
> tar file by the fact that it includes certain generated scripts like 
> "configure" that don't, strictly speaking, belong in your version 
> control branch (since they're automatically generated from other files.)  

In another project I've basically implemented this in a set of common Makefile
rules.  It is a bit annoying to debug complex make rules like this but it's 
not that hard my main problem is working in various odd policies and methods 
still around from a previous version of this stuff, and some of the
nonstandard stuff we did there, VOS follows more normal conventions.


> [1] Although there is a case to be made that such files should be 
> included in your repository anyway, since there are people who might 
> want to check out the latest source for something but still don't want 
> to be required to have every last little build tool.  Thoughts?

The problem with this is you can end up with these files being
regerenerated all the time and end up with a zillion revisions, each
with no significant change from the previous.

Reed