Re: Which files to distribute?

[Eric Blake]

On 01/29/2018 08:11 PM, Victor Porton wrote:
> Which of the following files should be uploaded to Git?

It depends.  Do you want git to track generated files, at the risk of
different installed autotools versions creating spurious diffs in those
generated files?  I don't personally recommend that, but some people
like to have their git repo usable even by someone that does not have
the autotools installed.  Or do you want to require someone checking out
the git repo to have tools installed on their machine that the end user
client of a tarball does not have to have?

> 
> aclocal.m4

Generated.

> autogen.sh

Not necessarily the best name (since there is an unrelated GNU Autogen
project); some projects prefer the name bootstrap for this sort of
script instead of autogen.sh.  At any rate, this script is NOT generated
by the autotools, so you probably need to check it into git (especially
if its goal is to run the autotools to bring a git checkout into a state
that you can then run the usual ./configure && make).

> compile
> config.guess
> config.sub
> configure
> depcomp

All generated.

> INSTALL

If you don't check this in, then you get the default version generated
that talks about GNU standards.  Which may be fine for your project, or
it may be inaccurate; if you check in your own version, automake will
leave your version intact.

> install-sh
> libtool
> ltmain.sh
> missing

All Generated.

So of those, I'd only check in autogen.sh (and consider renaming it).

However, your subject line said "Which files to distribute", not "Which
files to store in version control".  The answer there is "All of them" -
and automake will automatically distribute all of those files in a
tarball when you do 'make dist' (and you can run 'make distcheck' to
make sure your tarball is self-contained).

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org

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