A Cry For Sanity

[Andrew John Hughes]

Is there a particular reason we keep generated files (configure,
aclocal.m4, Makefile.in) in the repository?  I ideally like to remove
them for the following reasons:

* The changes in these files obscure the real work going on in many of
our diffs posted to the list e.g. a one line change in configure.ac
may cause many lines in configure to change.
* They may be generated differently on different platforms with
different autotools versions.  I've seen this myself when moving
between Debian and Gentoo boxes.  I also think that may be behind one
of Lillian's recent commits.
* When merging between trees, Mercurial tries to merge these files.
It's more an annoyance than everything, but I have to quit the editor,
tell it the merge was successful, then regenerate them.

IcedTea seems fairly autoreconf friendly and seems to work in
maintainer mode (regenerating the files) anyway.  Anyone capable of
installing Mercurial can surely also install the autotools?
-- 
Andrew :-)

Support Free Java!
Contribute to GNU Classpath and the OpenJDK
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath
http://openjdk.java.net

PGP Key: 94EFD9D8 (http://subkeys.pgp.net)
Fingerprint: F8EF F1EA 401E 2E60 15FA  7927 142C 2591 94EF D9D8