Re: What is minimum set of Automake work files needed for distribution on github?

[Russ Allbery]

Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> writes:

> The main problem with this is that not all users wanting to build from
> sources in the repository have the correct autotools versions.  Even if
> they do have the correct autotools versions, the sources may have been
> hacked by an OS Autotools package maintainer to work differently.

This doesn't work for all projects, but I've had a lot of success in the
past in automating the process I use to generate a tarball release (which
might be as simple as make dist), and just run it daily or weekly and
publish the resulting tarballs somewhere.  That lets people who really
want to run source repository snapshots still have a distribution-ready
tree that doesn't require autotools.

I intensely dislike committing autotools output to the repository.  It's a
matter of taste, honestly, and some people just do that, but I hate large,
generated files in version control since they're often not mergable and
cause all sorts of irritating issues on branching, commits from systems
with slightly different tool versions, etc.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>