On Fri, 14 Aug 2009, Roger Leigh wrote:
ÿÿ distribute generated release tarball
However, the "distribute release tarball" step is becoming less and
less relevant with the advent of git.
The "release tarball" step is always needed since software development
is protected by copyright laws so we need a step which is a equivalent
to publishing the work. A release branch or tag in a live repository
will not be compelling enough in a court of law. No judge or jury
would understand it or believe it. Creating a git repository to
contain the release and then bundling up so that it can be archived as
a new form of "tarball" would be sufficient as long as it is clearly
an act of publishing the work.
I do a lot of Debian packaging work, as well as actual software
development for Debian. All of this work nowadays occurs in git
repositories. For packages of software distributed by third
Maintenance for other OSs may be in Subversion, Mercurial, CVS,
Perforce, or one of the many other active version control systems.
ÿÿ Add a dist-git option and Makefile target.
This will cause $distdir to be injected into git, rather than just
calling tar as for other git targets.
It is easy enough for the Automake user to add targets like "dist-git"
since Automake is extensible. The main problem you will face is how
to herd the cats so that they all add a "dist-git" option that you
want for your particular release system. This seems quite hard to
accomplish unless your OS distribution can somehow become the clear
monopoly player so that the work of others can be ignored and rendered
pointless.
If this manages to be implemented flexibly and concrete enough to be
included in stock Automake, then it should be a requirement to support
the many other version control systems as well.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
