On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 11:11 PM, Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote: > NightStrike <nightstr...@gmail.com> writes: >> On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 7:53 PM, Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote: > >>> I suspect it depends on what sort of activities you expect people using >>> a VCS checkout directly to be doing, and also how sophisticated of a >>> VCS you're using. If you're using CVS, you basically can't do useful >>> merges anyway without supporting scripts and a bunch of pain, so the >>> additional merge conflicts from auto-generated files probably aren't >>> making your life much worse the way that they would in Git. > >> I never had an issue using svn on mingw-w64, and we keep >> configure/makefile.in/etc in the repo. It's a lot easier to make the >> developers on your project use the right versions of stuff than imposing >> that requirement on all of your users. In my mind, our users should be >> able to download, configure, compile, and use. Creating the build >> system (autoreconfing) shouldn't be their responsibility. > > I realize that opinions differ on this, but as far as I'm concerned, at > the point that you're pulling stuff directly from the VCS, you're not a > user. You're a developer. Users should download official releases, which > of course have everything already generated. > > I think this just varies based on what your developers are like and how > closed your project is, basically. People often say that they find it > fairly easy to make all developers on a project use identical versions of > the autotools. I find that sort of mind-boggling, since it would be > absolutely impossible for the projects that I work on. People contribute > to my projects using everything from NetBSD to Solaris, versions of Linux > from RHEL 4 to Debian unstable, and all sorts of random locally-installed > versions of stuff. I usually don't even have exactly the same versions of > Autoconf and Automake on all the different systems that *I* use to do > development. > > I'm certainly not going to ask people to install some specific version of > Autoconf before contributing to the build system of my projects. There > shouldn't be any need. > > -- > Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> > > >
The tcl project has an interesting solution. Anyone commits changes to configure.ac/Makefile.am, and then they ask the people that can do so to regenerate the other files. It has holes, of course, but it works for them :) As you say, every project has its own needs.