Yo Brian Barrett: cast your brain into the WayBack(tm) machine... Do you remember why we include autogen.pl in distribution tarballs?
My recollection is: 1. It was handy for OMPI developers to "make dist" in a SVN checkout to take a tarball over to back-end machine where you couldn't do an SVN checkout. In short: including autogen.* in the tarball (and all of its machinery) makes "make dist" tarballs that are functional for an OMPI developer. 2. We wanted to be friendly to 3rd-party vendors who have their own out-of-tree plugins. They can take an official release tarball, add their components into the source tree, run autogen, and be good to go. 3. It seemed like the Right Thing to do. ---- The question came up today on the weekly call for obscure reasons... not worth describing here. But it raised the question, "Is there a reason we include autogen.pl in the tarball?" I dug in history, and I see that autogen.sh was added here: https://svn.open-mpi.org/trac/ompi/changeset/17505 It cited the wrong Trac ticket, but I found that, too: https://svn.open-mpi.org/trac/ompi/ticket/1205 Neither of them really talks much about *why* we added autogen.sh to the tarball. FWIW: The switch from SVN ti Git may obviate #1. #2 hasn't really ever occurred. Although it could happen in the future, 3rd-party vendors can just grab from github at the right Git tag, too. #3 ...shrug. Do you have a memory of a stronger reason than #3 to keep autogen.pl in the tarball? (I don't have a super strong opinion either way, I think -- perhaps 51% in favor of removing it from the tarball, simply because we do occasionally get the user on us...@open-mpi.org who runs autogen.pl for no reason, and then runs into problems because they've got old Autotools) -- Jeff Squyres jsquy...@cisco.com For corporate legal information go to: http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/legal/cri/
