Re: Infinite loop on make dist

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 12:17:09PM +0200, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> [...]  The principle is "all users are
> developers, even if they aren't, they may become so".  That's very
> important for acquiring new developers, and for allowing ordinary users
> to improve the code, or send patches.
> 
> I for one am quite annoyed if a tarball doesn't give me full access
> to the software, [...]
> This has kept me from sending patches to projects before.

I second with this, of course.  We differ in application of this
idea.  I cannot see how a missing autogen.sh disables you to write a
patch...

IIRC correcty, the original story was like this:
I wrote a patch against the just-released 2.62.
As you all tought me, I tried to test it before submitting.
So I did "make distcheck" and it failed.
And it took me some time to find out that it was already broken in
the original 2.62 tarball, and that it was because of some
maintainer-only version-computing hacks.

That why I came to the opinion that a plain autotools-generated
tarball would be better than tarball containing the confusing hooks.

I hope this explains it.

Stepan