A Cry For Sanity

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for bringing this up.

On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 23:29 +0100, Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> 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?

O yes! 100% agreed. The constant checking in of modified generated files
makes building and hacking on IcedTea no fun at all. A project should be
easy to checkout and build. The current situation forces us to either
constantly track down the minor revision of the various autotools to
just build the damn thing and not get all files regenerated differently,
or to constantly check in slightly different versions of the generated
files, obscuring the actual work being done. The only thing these
checked in generated files do is get in the way of people just wanting
to build and hack on the code. Please, please, please, lets remove these
generated files from the mercurial repo and return to sanity again.

Cheers,

Mark