Re: Auto-Generating ChangeLog and AUTHORS for projects in a version tracking system?
Am 30.10.2014 10:15, schrieb Diego Elio Pettenò: > On 30 October 2014 06:45, Arne Babenhauserheide (IMK) > wrote: >> Am 30.10.2014 00:43, schrieb Diego Elio Pettenò: >> I don’t want to change the GNU style. I want to have an easier way to >> *adhere to* the existing GNU style by providing default tool support for >> creating the ChangeLog and AUTHORS file from versiontracking systems. > > Great. But people don't *want* to adhere to the GNU style, Do not want to adhere to the GNU style or do they not want to bother with creating the files? There is a very important difference in motivation: People from the first group get what they want with foreign style. People from the latter group however would be happy to use GNU style, if it did not create additional work for them. This change is for the latter group, since the former group can already switch to foreign style by just adding a single parameter. > most people > just end up creating 0-sized AUTHORS NEWS and ChangeLog files, because > otherwise automake fails, and then they complain about autotools being > messy and requiring useless boilerplate. Autogenerating the AUTHORS and ChangeLog would reduce this to a single 0-sized file, because nowadays most people understand that a README is important -- I think the same will happen for the NEWS file, once code hosting platforms start using the NEWS file as source to provide human-readable news about projects. Then this would eliminate the 0-sized files. Best wishes, Arne PS: I know your autotools mythbuster: It helped me a lot in adding distcheck-support for my projects. Example: https://bitbucket.org/ArneBab/wisp/src/6cf3f78205bec638f9eb8aba7344946e70bfd0e1/Makefile.am Sadly much of my own autotools work also involved cargo-culting. Note: Here you note that autotools need COPYING, but this is created automatically nowadays. You only need to provide it if you don’t want to use the GPL. - https://autotools.io/automake/options.html -- Doktorand Gruppe: GHG Raum: 435/410 Tel.: +49 721 608-22885 arne.babenhauserhe...@kit.edu Karlsruher Institut für Technologie IMK-ASF Postfach 36 40 76021 Karlsruhe 0xA70DA09E.asc Description: application/pgp-keys <> signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Auto-Generating ChangeLog and AUTHORS for projects in a version tracking system?
Hi Flameeyes, Am 30.10.2014 00:43, schrieb Diego Elio Pettenò: > All good and well, but then I may have misunderstood Arne's original > point. If he's trying to get the GNU style to be "good enough" That means I did not make my point clear enough. Second try: I don’t want to change the GNU style. I want to have an easier way to *adhere to* the existing GNU style by providing default tool support for creating the ChangeLog and AUTHORS file from versiontracking systems. Having NEWS, README, ChangeLog and AUTHORS in a release tarball makes a lot of sense, and having NEWS and README also makes a lot of sense in a version tracking system (I see that every time I try to use a project which does not have them). It’s just that when using a version tracking system, the ChangeLog and AUTHORS file mostly duplicate information which is already in the version tracking system. This isn’t true for all projects. With complicated history a generated ChangeLog can become useless and when committing patches from others and forgetting to change the user, an autogenerated AUTHORS file can simply be wrong. But for most projects they should be valid. Additional motivation for this: If I want to teach someone to switch from a simple Makefile to autotools, I have to talk about - configure.ac (this is mostly copy-paste, adjusting name and version) - Makefile.am (copy-paste from a similar project or adapt a Makefile) - autoreconf -i; ./configure; make (“copy this into the README”) - NEWS (“put the newest version at the top”) - README (“describe how to use the project and how to contribute”) - AUTHORS (“name all people who contributed”) - ChangeLog (describe the changes in GNU style. This means: - first line: date and author: https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Style-of-Change-Logs.html - changes indented. - Start each changed file with a star (* file). - optionally name the function. - (a few special cases). - Description after a colon and in following lines, also indented. - empty line between independent changes? As you can see, how to write a conforming ChangeLog takes roughly as much explanation as writing the configure.ac. And every new contributor will have to learn how to do that (while the other topics are only needed for the initial setup or for the maintainer). Best wishes, Arne PS: I consider make distcheck as the gold standard for distributing projects. I did not yet find a tool which gets close to matching that. -- Doktorand Gruppe: GHG Raum: 435/410 Tel.: +49 721 608-22885 arne.babenhauserhe...@kit.edu Karlsruher Institut für Technologie IMK-ASF Postfach 36 40 76021 Karlsruhe 0xA70DA09E.asc Description: application/pgp-keys <> signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Auto-Generating ChangeLog and AUTHORS for projects in a version tracking system?
Dear GNU Hackers, In quite a few guides I saw people suggest using the foreign automake style to avoid having to create the required text files. The goal of this email is to get more people to use the GNU style, so the interface for understanding an autotools project becomes more consistent again: GNU style should become standard for all guides. Among the required files, NEWS is easy to create but cannot be guessed automatically because it is intended for humans, and README is becoming standard (again) due to most code hosting sites using it as the summary page. AUTHORS and ChangeLog normally only contain information which already available in most version tracking systems - and can be created easily from that. If autotools did this automatically, the barrier for using GNU style in the autotools with a version tracking system would be much smaller: Just write README and NEWS. I initially planned to just send a small example script, but that matured faster than I had expected, so you can now find it at https://bitbucket.org/ArneBab/autochangelog/src/tip/create-or-update-changelog-and-authors.sh If someone with git-foo could cleanup the git ChangeLog creation to conform with the GNU ChangeLog standard, that script should be a good working example. The script only touches files which were created by the script or are missing. Best wishes, Arne PS: I initially sent this mail to the autoconf list. The original discussion is at [1] and includes the gnulib script which roughly does for git what I propose here. Doing this in automake would have the advantage that all users benefit from the lower barrier of entry to the consistent GNU style. [1]: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2014-10/msg0.html -- Doktorand Gruppe: GHG Raum: 435/410 Tel.: +49 721 608-22885 arne.babenhauserhe...@kit.edu Karlsruher Institut für Technologie IMK-ASF Postfach 36 40 76021 Karlsruhe 0xA70DA09E.asc Description: application/pgp-keys 0xA70DA09E.asc Description: application/pgp-keys <> signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
how to silence make distcheck?
Hi, I’m using silent rules with automake and I can silence make check by using autoreconf -i ./configure --quiet make check --quiet But when I run make distcheck --quiet, I get the full configure output and $(AM_V_P) seems to not be set in the Makefile. autoreconf -i make distcheck --quiet Can I silence this? Best wishes, Arne -- Doktorand Gruppe: GHG Raum: 435/410 Tel.: +49 721 608-22885 arne.babenhauserhe...@kit.edu Karlsruher Institut für Technologie IMK-ASF Postfach 36 40 76021 Karlsruhe 0xA70DA09E.asc Description: application/pgp-keys <> signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Managing Emacs org-mode projects with automake - how to make this easier?
Am 24.10.2013 20:45, schrieb Gavin Smith: > From your link: >> I use pyxplot for generating some plots. Pyxplot does not have a way (I know >> of) to search for datafiles in a different folder. I have to copy the files >> to the build dir and kill them after the build. But only if I use a separate >> build dir. > > If I understand rightly, you are having a problem with VPATH builds? > Is there no way to get your tools (emacs and pyxplot) to read from > files in the source directory but output in the current directory? For pyxplot I did not find a way to make it read from different paths depending on whether I run `make distcheck` or just `make`. The paths for the datafiles are encoded within the scriptfile. For emacs I use org-mode to export, and that exports to where the file is. I might be able to change that by using the publish-mechanism, but I’m not sure about that. Stackoverflow suggests something, though: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9559753/emacs-org-mode-export-to-another-directory #+bind: org-export-publishing-directory "./exports" * This is a test headline Some text here. This should be exported to the "./exports" directory. I might be able to do that for the more important part (emacs) with an additional --eval. I’m asking at emacs-orgm...@gnu.org. Best wishes, Arne -- Doktorand Gruppe: GHG Raum: 435/410 Tel.: +49 721 608-22885 arne.babenhauserhe...@kit.edu Karlsruher Institut für Technologie IMK-ASF Postfach 36 40 76021 Karlsruhe 0xA70DA09E.asc Description: application/pgp-keys <> signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Managing Emacs org-mode projects with automake - how to make this easier?
Dear Automake hackers,
I am using autotools to build org-mode projects and prepare them for
publication.
The nice part is that `make distcheck` does the hard work of checking
whether all the required parts are in the distribution.
The not so nice part is, though, that the Makefile.am looks quite messy.
Very messy in fact:
$ cat Makefile.am
vortrag = vortrag.pdf
vortrag_DATA = vortrag.org data.txt dist-tarball.png
vortragdir = .
EXTRA_DIST = ${vortrag_DATA} ${vortrag}
MOSTLYCLEANFILES = \\\#* *~ *.bak *.vrb *.bbl *.blg *_flymake.* #
kill editor backups and latex stuff
CLEANFILES = ${vortrag}
DISTCLEANFILES = ${CLEANFILES} \\\#* *~ *.bak *.vrb *.bbl *.blg
*_flymake.* auto/*el
all : ${vortrag}
${vortrag} : ${vortrag_DATA}
if test "$<" != "$(notdir $<)"; then cp -u "$<" "$(notdir $<)"; fi
echo yes | @emacs@ --batch --load "~/.emacs" --visit "$(notdir $<)"
--funcall org-beamer-export-to-pdf
if test "$<" != "$(notdir $<)"; then rm -f "$(notdir $<)"; rm -f
$(basename $(notdir $<)).tex $(basename $(notdir $<)).tex~
auto/$(basename $(notdir $<)).el; else rm -f $(basename $<).tex
$(basename $<).tex~ auto/$(basename $<).el; fi
Most of this is required to make distcheck happy.
Is there a way to make this cleaner?
Best wishes,
Arne
PS: I documented my usage of autotools on
http://draketo.de/light/english/free-software/makefile-to-autotools
--
Doktorand
Gruppe: GHG
Raum: 435/410
Tel.: +49 721 608-22885
arne.babenhauserhe...@kit.edu
Karlsruher Institut für Technologie
IMK-ASF
Postfach 36 40
76021 Karlsruhe
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