Re: autotools clean up

[Sami Kerola]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 12:53 PM, Ben Elliston <address@hidden> wrote:
> Thanks for the patch.  I think, though, that we are happy working with
> the tree the way it is (ie. not requiring casual developers to have
> the autotools installed).

Hi Ben,

IMHO it is not unreasonable expectation that upstream contributors has
autotools installed. If someone want to develop without them the
person could take tar ball release version. Notice that the patch also
makes creating a tar ball very trivial. All one has to do is 'make
dist', which did not work earlier. I do admit the patch will create
new dependency to a tool set, but perhaps it is not too high price of
being certain consistency of auto generated files. Previously the
examples where for instance using rather old versions, while main
directory contents had new stuff. While that might work I suppose it
is not favourable situation[1]. Plus some people think 'Autogenerated
files inside the VCS repo are almost always a bad idea.'[2]

At the end it is your, maintainers, call if yo want to merge the patch
or not. I sincerely hope you would reconsider if old tree really is
nice sustainable state.

[1] http://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamGuide#Autoconf_and_Automake
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/03/msg00686.html

-- 
   Sami Kerola
   http://www.iki.fi/kerolasa/