Re: texinfo-6.7.90 tarball contains files that "make distclean" erases

[Gavin Smith]

On Sat, Feb 27, 2021 at 06:52:43PM -0600, Jacob Bachmeyer wrote:
> Gavin Smith wrote:
> > On Sat, Feb 27, 2021 at 02:41:57PM +0100, Bruno Haible wrote:
> > > Also the files MiscXS.c, TestXS.c, XSParagraph.c were included in the
> > > tarball, although "make clean" or "make distclean" deletes them. There
> > > are two possible ways to fix this:
> > 
> > I think option B below would be the safer one.  We check for xsubpp with
> > AM_MISSING_PROG so don't currently require it to be available.
> 
> I am fairly sure that any system with a perl capable of loading XS modules
> has a working xsubpp.
> 
> As I understand, the .xs file is the proper source file and there are few,
> if any, guarantees that the generated .c file will work with any perl other
> than the one used to produce it.  In other words, distributing the .c files
> xsubpp produces is pointless, as anyone who can use them will also have
> xsubpp to generate them and weird and bizarre bugs can occur if those files
> should have been regenerated with the local xsubpp but were taken as
> distributed for whatever reason.

That's what you say, but I don't know if it is true.  The fact is we distributed
the .c file before and nobody reported any problems.  That would be enough on
its own, but the "perlxs" manual has the following:

       Of course, one could write such glue code directly in C.  However, this
       would be a tedious task, especially if one needs to write glue for
       multiple C functions, and/or one is not familiar enough with the Perl
       stack discipline and other such arcana.  XS comes to the rescue here:
       instead of writing this glue C code in long-hand, one can write a more
       concise short-hand description of what should be done by the glue, and
       let the XS compiler xsubpp handle the rest.

So I think is better to distribute the .c files unless there's good evidence
that it causes a problem somewhere.