Re: revision control info in generated files

[Jef Driesen]

On 13/04/10 11:33, Steffen Dettmer wrote:
> I think including the generated source in the tarball is wrong
> and can break things. First thing that will break is that you
> will have one version.h in srcdir (from the tarball) and
> optionally a second one in builddir (from config.status/make).
> (config.h also isn't included in the tarball.)

Good point. Although I don't understand why some generated files are 
distributed in my project, and others are not. See below.

> [...]
>
> Do you want to support the compiler CL.EXE (which is not needing
> an msvc project file but can be run via make) or do you want to
> support the integrated development environment Visual Studio
> instead of using make?
>
> [...]

I support the Visual Studio IDE, not the cl.exe compiler.

I'm well aware that there are limitations in what the IDE can do, but 
for many (most?) windows developers compiling is equivalent to loading 
the project into the IDE and compile the code from there. Even my own 
experience with the msvc compiler is limited to using the IDE :-(

What I want to avoid is that windows developers have to install msys 
(and similar tools) to be able to generate some files first. Anyone 
using msys is more likely to use the mingw anyway. I'm sure a mixed 
msys/msvc environment has it use, but I think it's more typical to have 
either msys/mingw or a pure msvc setup.

> > I just checked, and for a resource file (*.rc) in my project
> > that is generated from configure.ac, both the .rc.in and .rc
> > file are included in the tarball when I run make distcheck.
>
> An AC_CONFIG_FILES([xxx.rc.in]) does not lead to inclusion of
> either xxx.rc.in nor xxx.rc (and how could it, maybe xxx.rc.in is
> automatically generated from xxx.rc.in.in or whatever :)).
> Usually, you'd add xxx.rc.in to EXTRA_DIST (and xxx.rc to
> BUILT_SOURCES). Then you'd get xxx.rc.in in src dist but xxx.rc
> generated by configure and updated by make, working correctly
> thanks to autoconf/automake.

This is strange. I generate both a resource file (xxx.rc) and pkg-config 
file (xxx.pc) from configure.ac. And the tarball contains both the 
xxx.rc.in and xxx.rc file, but only the xxx.pc.in file.

It seems that the xxx.pc.in is always distributed, even if I remove it 
from EXTRA_DIST. According to your explanation, it shouldn't be 
distributed in that case, but I have no idea why it's does go into the 
tarball.

For the xxx.rc file, maybe the reason why it's distributed is because I 
have xxx_la_SOURCES += xxx.rc in my Makefile.am?