Re: Built-in target to delete all generated files

[Russ Allbery]

NightStrike <address@hidden> writes:
> On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 7:53 PM, Russ Allbery <address@hidden> wrote:

>> I suspect it depends on what sort of activities you expect people using
>> a VCS checkout directly to be doing, and also how sophisticated of a
>> VCS you're using.  If you're using CVS, you basically can't do useful
>> merges anyway without supporting scripts and a bunch of pain, so the
>> additional merge conflicts from auto-generated files probably aren't
>> making your life much worse the way that they would in Git.

> I never had an issue using svn on mingw-w64, and we keep
> configure/makefile.in/etc in the repo.  It's a lot easier to make the
> developers on your project use the right versions of stuff than imposing
> that requirement on all of your users.  In my mind, our users should be
> able to download, configure, compile, and use.  Creating the build
> system (autoreconfing) shouldn't be their responsibility.

I realize that opinions differ on this, but as far as I'm concerned, at
the point that you're pulling stuff directly from the VCS, you're not a
user.  You're a developer.  Users should download official releases, which
of course have everything already generated.

I think this just varies based on what your developers are like and how
closed your project is, basically.  People often say that they find it
fairly easy to make all developers on a project use identical versions of
the autotools.  I find that sort of mind-boggling, since it would be
absolutely impossible for the projects that I work on.  People contribute
to my projects using everything from NetBSD to Solaris, versions of Linux
from RHEL 4 to Debian unstable, and all sorts of random locally-installed
versions of stuff.  I usually don't even have exactly the same versions of
Autoconf and Automake on all the different systems that *I* use to do
development.

I'm certainly not going to ask people to install some specific version of
Autoconf before contributing to the build system of my projects.  There
shouldn't be any need.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>