Re: CVS Guile and configure, Makefile.in, and other auxiliary files...

[Marius Vollmer]

"Lars J. Aas" <address@hidden> writes:

> I'd like to try out Guile from the CVS repository.  Because I'm
> mostly doing work with Autoconf 2.49b (CVS), Automake 1.4a (CVS),
> I've scrapped the older, buggier, less portable versions of those
> tools...  This makes it of course impossible to bootstrap the
> Guile CVS repository.

Why?  Are there bugs in our configure stuff?

> Is there a very strong reason for not adding the auto-generated
> files to the Guile repository?

I don't think the reason is very strong.  For a while, we had the
created files checked in, but now we don't mostly due to my urging.

I think that checking generated files into CVS causes more annoyances
for the developers than it solves.  In effect it requires every one to
have the exact same set of auto* tools in use for Guile.  This might
not be a bad thing, incidentally, but it is also a obstacle.

I think the current arrangement works fine.  I no longer have
conflicts in files that I didn't touch.  Also, I think it is a good
thing to have a automated procedure for generating all things that can
be generated from human-written source files.  This is what autogen.sh
does currently.  Already, it has acquired some non-obvious hacks in
the form of guile-aclocal.sh, and I think it is good that we such a
thing.

But once we have it, there is no longer a real need to have generated
files in CVS.  To me it seems wrong to do so, because generated files
don't need change entries, or revision numbers of their own.

One might argue that a history log can come in handy for generated
files as well, to see exactly what was going on in a certain point in
time.  Hmm yes, but I would like to believe that this is only
necessary in sufficently weird conditions.