Re: Built-in target to delete all generated files

[NightStrike]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 7:53 PM, Russ Allbery <address@hidden> wrote:
> Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> My project uses maintainer-mode and I always check these generated files
>> into the source code repository.  The end user might not be able to
>> produce a working set of files based on whatever random autotools they
>> have on their system.
>
> I used to do this, but it quickly turned into a major annoyance.  You get
> all sorts of spurious differences based on what version of the tools
> people regenerating files happened to have installed and then all sorts of
> obnoxious merge conflicts and related problems when trying to integrate
> third-party branches.
>
> I suspect it depends on what sort of activities you expect people using a
> VCS checkout directly to be doing, and also how sophisticated of a VCS
> you're using.  If you're using CVS, you basically can't do useful merges
> anyway without supporting scripts and a bunch of pain, so the additional
> merge conflicts from auto-generated files probably aren't making your life
> much worse the way that they would in Git.

I never had an issue using svn on mingw-w64, and we keep
configure/makefile.in/etc in the repo.  It's a lot easier to make the
developers on your project use the right versions of stuff than
imposing that requirement on all of your users.  In my mind, our users
should be able to download, configure, compile, and use.  Creating the
build system (autoreconfing) shouldn't be their responsibility.