NightStrike <nightstr...@gmail.com> writes: > On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 7:53 PM, Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>> I suspect it depends on what sort of activities you expect people using >> a VCS checkout directly to be doing, and also how sophisticated of a >> VCS you're using. If you're using CVS, you basically can't do useful >> merges anyway without supporting scripts and a bunch of pain, so the >> additional merge conflicts from auto-generated files probably aren't >> making your life much worse the way that they would in Git. > I never had an issue using svn on mingw-w64, and we keep > configure/makefile.in/etc in the repo. It's a lot easier to make the > developers on your project use the right versions of stuff than imposing > that requirement on all of your users. In my mind, our users should be > able to download, configure, compile, and use. Creating the build > system (autoreconfing) shouldn't be their responsibility. I realize that opinions differ on this, but as far as I'm concerned, at the point that you're pulling stuff directly from the VCS, you're not a user. You're a developer. Users should download official releases, which of course have everything already generated. I think this just varies based on what your developers are like and how closed your project is, basically. People often say that they find it fairly easy to make all developers on a project use identical versions of the autotools. I find that sort of mind-boggling, since it would be absolutely impossible for the projects that I work on. People contribute to my projects using everything from NetBSD to Solaris, versions of Linux from RHEL 4 to Debian unstable, and all sorts of random locally-installed versions of stuff. I usually don't even have exactly the same versions of Autoconf and Automake on all the different systems that *I* use to do development. I'm certainly not going to ask people to install some specific version of Autoconf before contributing to the build system of my projects. There shouldn't be any need. -- Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
