Re: Building SVN source failures: VPATH builds; Cygwin

[Hans-Bernhard Bröker]

Am 14.01.2017 um 08:40 schrieb Eli Zaretskii:
> > From: Hans-Bernhard Bröker <address@hidden>
> > Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2017 23:53:12 +0100
> > Cc: Texinfo <address@hidden>
> >
> > I usually prefer sticking with the "no generated files in version
> > control (except for rather exotic generators)" approach.
>
> That would require everyone who wants to build out of the repository
> to have all the necessary tools of the correct versions installed,
> which might not be a very user-friendly approach.

Git sources already routinely require people to have quite a collection 
of tools --- more than distributed tarballs, anyway.  Walking along the 
bleeding edge does require stronger shoes.

> I actually don't understand why this urge to remove generated files
> from the repository, since VPATH should DTRT with stale files anyway,

The reason I started this thread was that the ones in place really 
didn't.  The rules to generate fresh files weren't even run, because the 
VPATH rules believed there was no need.  But the rules using them didn't 
find them.  Worse yet, the gnulib configuration ruls failed _silently_, 
causing rather weird compiler errors.

The core problem here was that not just some automake/autoconf generated 
files were in the repository, but configure and make generated ones as well.

I can see the point in keeping files in the repository that would 
require somewhat exotic tools to update / regenerate.  I honestly can't 
see automake or autoconf as exotic, though.   gnulib OTOH, does count as 
exotic.  The tricky point here is texindex.awk, which requires

Building texindex.awk from ti.twjr uses jrtangle, which requires not 
just any awk, but specifically GNU awk.  Yet there's no configure test 
or automake conditional to keep people from accidentaly using an awk 
that can't run jrtangle.  I can see why having texindex.awk in the 
repository makes sense in that case.  But then the Makefile.am's have to 
take that decision into account, too.