Chris Marusich <cmmarus...@gmail.com> writes: > l...@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes: > >> Hello, >> >> Chris Marusich <cmmarus...@gmail.com> skribis: >> >>> Mark H Weaver <m...@netris.org> writes: >>> >>>> So, we still have a decision to make: whether to delete these generated >>>> files (possibly in a snippet) to avoid using pre-generated non-source >>>> files in our build. I would be in favor of it. >>>> >>>> I'd like to hear opinions on this. >> >> I’d be in favor of removing these, especially since that seems to be an >> easy change, but… >> >>> Perhaps we can consider our existing packages as a precedent. Many >>> packages include files in their source distribution that were >>> auto-generated by the Autotools. For example, consider the "configure" >>> script that Autoconf generates. Is there a significant difference >>> between the "configure" script and the "pre-generated non-source files" >>> you're talking about? >> >> Indeed, there’s a long tradition in GNU to ship generated code to >> facilitate bootstrapping. There’s configure, Makefile.in, etc., and >> there’s also Bison- and Flex-generated files often. >> >> I have mixed feelings about this. I think it’s great to be able to use >> these pre-generated files; our bootstrap graph would be much more >> complicated or even out of reach if we were to re-generate everything. >> OTOH, it’s true that this is the elephant in the room in terms of >> bootstrapping. >> >> Maybe it’s a can of worms we’d rather leave aside. :-) >> >> Thoughts? > > Given the profound silence on this topic, I am inclined to agree with > you that it's a can of worms we'd rather leave aside. Therefore, I > think we should do whatever is most practical, so I am happy to defer to > Mark on this. If it's easy to remove the auto-generated files, I see no > reason for us to avoid removing them. If it's difficult to remove the > auto-generated files, I don't think we should bend over backwards to > remove them.
I agree that this can be a case by case decision. In general I’d like *all* generated files to be rebuilt from source, including build system files. Since this can be problematic I’d adopt a pragmatic approach of removing and rebuiling generated files when it is clearly feasible. For things that are really difficult and seemingly hopeless we have the bootstrappable project. -- Ricardo
