Am 19.09.2021 um 00:32 schrieb Ken Brown via Cygwin:
Finally, I'd like to mention that it's extremely common for
autotools-based packages to have an autogen script like Cygwin's
(sometimes called bootstrap or bootstrap.sh). There's nothing
surprising about this.
It's unsurprising to have that state of things in git checkouts.
It _is_ very surprising for tarballs, though. Those are generally
expected to be buildable without having to run autoconf, automake,
gettext, etc. I'm pretty sure the GNU coding standards have required it
since day 1. Automake generates tons of makefile real estate just for
this.
Generally speaking, removing the generated files (configure, aclocal.m4,
Makefile.in, etc.) from git, while laudable, comes at the cost of three
extra pieces of effort:
1) Unless a simple "autoreconf -is" is sufficient to do the job, a
script like autogen.sh has to be prepared and put into the git
2) To the greatest extent feasible, maintainer rules have to be made to
actually work to auto-update those generated files without the hassle of
having to re-run autogen.sh
3) Preparing a release tarball is no longer quite as simple as just
zipping up an other wise unchanged, fresh checkout (without the .git).
That checkout will differ from a proper tarball in both directions:
there will be files that should be in the tarball, but not in the
checked-out copy, and there will be files in the check-out that should
not got into the tarball. autogen.sh itself, and the special README
telling people about it, are among the latter.
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