[bug#56729] [RFC PATCH 00/10] Add sagemath.

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On Tue Aug 9, 2022 at 11:47 AM BST, Andreas Enge wrote:
> Ah, interesting. Which one should we do? I personally tend to prefer tarballs
> (as the official distribution mechanism of the project). Recently there has
> been a preference in the Guix project for git repositories when autotools
> are involved, as they make it possible to recreate the configure scripts
> from their source. But since this is not the case here, the argument does
> not hold.

I think it does sometimes hold even for projects that don't use autotools,
especially older ones: they sometimes work under the assumption that users
do not generally care about generated files in their release source, but
don't want to put generated files in their development repository.

This, of course, is why the autotools generated files problem exists in the
first place; autoconf was, after all, designed so that users didn't have to
have it installed to build a package, in a world where compiling from release
tarballs was the usual way to get new software.

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