Hi all, I've not seen this discussed in mailing list archive. Is there any past discussions?
Its pretty common practice (but not 100%) that projects using autotools to not check in files generated by autoconf/autoreconf into CVS/git/etc. Currently, the sane project falls into the camp that they check these files into CVS. Is the project open to removing these files? What would that change mean to you? It requires CVS users to have autotools installed on their system and the first time you check out CVS, you'd have to manually run "autoreconf --install". Not much beyond that; although autotools will be required to stay on the system in case a CVS update requires rerunning it. Reasons to continue leaving them in CVS: * Autotools not required, as long as developer is not modifying configure.in Reasons for leaving them out of CVS: * People submitting patches tend to have a wide range of autotools versions on their systems. This leads to multiple issue. They include but are not limited to: ** A one line change to configure.in will cause 100's of lines of updates to CVS after running "autoreconf" if submitters version of autotools doesn't match the previous persons (newer or older). For example, I'm running autoconf 2.63 but main submitter to current CVS seems to be using 2.61 ** Autotools scripts are not perfect when it updates files. When you rerun autoreconf, its easy to have only some autotools support files updated. The support files could be from incompatible versions of autotools. Its easy for this mismatched files to find their way into CVS and cause other peoples compiles to fail. I've seen this in other projects. The work around is to run "autoreconf --install --force" but that has its own issues (like overwriting our custom ltmain.sh). Files requested to remove from CVS. acinclude.m4 aclocal.m4 config.guess config.sub configure install-sh mkinstalldirs include/sane/config.h.in Files note requested to remove: ltmail.sh [ custom modified ] libtool.m4 [ forces aclocal.m4 to have macros that match custom ltmail.sh ] [ automake can install/overwrite the following files at times ] INSTALL NEWS README AUTHORS ChangeLog COPYING Chris
