Re: What to check into repository?

[Bob Proulx]

Hongliang Wang wrote:
> My company decides to make part of our software source code
> open-sourced.  For this part, we will use automake & autoconf tools
> to generate the installation package (.tar.gz).

That sounds wonderful!

> However, the current problem is that we cannot decide what to check
> into our own software repository. The .c and .h files will
> definitely be needed to check in, but what about the Makefile.am
> configure.ac, and even the executable files like missing, compile,
> autogen.sh, aclocal.m4, autom4te.cache/ ?

If you wrote the file by hand then check it in.  If the file was
generated by a tool then don't.  This means that configure.ac and
Makefile.am files should definitely get checked in since they are
source files.  But generated files such as autom4te.cache should
definitely not get checked in.

There is debate about some files such as the ./configure script.  I
strongly do not like it checked in because it is generated and a large
number of spurious differences in version control ensues.  But a
counter argument is when it requires a special bootstrap to generate.
In that case having a seed version in version control would enable
someone to use it to bootstrap things along.

In any case the process that you are looking for is to be able to do a
pristine checkout from version control and then to rebuild
everything.  You did not say what version control system so I will
simply assume one without loss of generality.  The flow would go like
this:

  git clone git://git.example.com/project
  cd project
  autoreconf --install
  ./configure
  make
  make distcheck

Bob