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

[Gavin Smith]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 11:35:53PM +0100, Bruno Haible wrote:
> 
> When you look into the files MiscXS.c, TestXS.c, XSParagraph.c (search for
> PERL_VERSION in there) you can see that
> 
>   * The generated C code needs to be dependent on the Perl version,
>   * xsubpp has produced code that is compatible with older Perl versions.
> 
> So, if you produce the tarball with Perl version X and users have a version
> compatible to X or smaller than X, everything is fine.
> 
> What is not covered is the forward compatibility: If you produce the tarball
> with a Perl version that exists today, and in two years the newest Perl
> requires different C code and thus the latest xsubpp generates
> PERL_VERSION conditionals to cope for this case, you get bug reports
> because the files that you have included in the tarball are incompatible.
> 
> I would therefore follow Jacob's wisdom.
> 
> Bruno
> 

I don't want to make this change at this stage and discover a load of
problems with various platforms that we never had before.  Also, if the *.c
file was missing from the release and the user didn't have xsubpp, they would
have no way to reproduce it, whereas if the *.c is incompatible and they
do have xsubpp, they could always delete the *.c file and then regenerate
it. 

Maybe we could reconsider it after the next release but I only want to make
very minor changes at this point.