Checking in generated files (Was: 7179349 misses updating new build makefiles)

[Magnus Ihse Bursie]

We can still have make dependencies between source file and generated file, so we catch whenever the source files have changed. I'm not sure how that would be a huge maintainence burden.

And let me be clear: we should of course check in the source code also. And the tools needed to generate the file. But if we also check in the resulting output, we can simplify the build 99% of the time.

IANAL, so I can't comment on the legal issues. But to me it sounds strange. In general, using a tool to generate output does not change copyright status. Otherwise Microsoft would be able to claim ownership of all documents written in Word. 

/Magnus

26 okt 2012 kl. 05:16 skrev Kelly O'Hair <kelly.ohair at oracle.com>:

> Checking in generated files is never a good idea when it can be avoided.
> It just creates a long term maintenance issue and can create legal issues depending on what the generated file is.
> 
> I'm open to ideas here, I don't like the current situation, but I'd rather have it this way than to check in a
> generated file. This is not generated java code, but generated native code.
> 
> -kto
> 
> On Oct 24, 2012, at 7:41 AM, Magnus Ihse Bursie wrote:
> 
>> On 2012-10-24 00:20, Mike Duigou wrote:
>>> How so? It's a MacOS specific dependency and always present there. (at least since 10.4)
>> Well, in that case it sounds good. In principle I think the current explosion of small build tools is, eh, not so good.
>> 
>> On the other hand, most of these small build tools keep re-generating the very same stuff with identical result over and over again, since it's based on some not-very-often-changing source. I think it would be more efficient to check in the source code that these tools generate, and then have a special target "update-generated-sources" that will run these tools. This tool would only have to be run every now and then, and the generated java source code could be compiled with the normal code, making it possible to start java compilation directly when building the jdk target.
>> 
>> /Magnus
>