Dear GNU Hackers,
In quite a few guides I saw people suggest using the foreign automake style to avoid having to create the required text files. The goal of this email is to get more people to use the GNU style, so the interface for understanding an autotools project becomes more consistent again: GNU style should become standard for all guides. Among the required files, NEWS is easy to create but cannot be guessed automatically because it is intended for humans, and README is becoming standard (again) due to most code hosting sites using it as the summary page. AUTHORS and ChangeLog normally only contain information which already available in most version tracking systems - and can be created easily from that. If autotools did this automatically, the barrier for using GNU style in the autotools with a version tracking system would be much smaller: Just write README and NEWS. I initially planned to just send a small example script, but that matured faster than I had expected, so you can now find it at https://bitbucket.org/ArneBab/autochangelog/src/tip/create-or-update-changelog-and-authors.sh If someone with git-foo could cleanup the git ChangeLog creation to conform with the GNU ChangeLog standard, that script should be a good working example. The script only touches files which were created by the script or are missing. Best wishes, Arne PS: I initially sent this mail to the autoconf list. The original discussion is at [1] and includes the gnulib script which roughly does for git what I propose here. Doing this in automake would have the advantage that all users benefit from the lower barrier of entry to the consistent GNU style. [1]: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2014-10/msg00000.html -- Doktorand Gruppe: GHG Raum: 435/410 Tel.: +49 721 608-22885 arne.babenhauserhe...@kit.edu Karlsruher Institut für Technologie IMK-ASF Postfach 36 40 76021 Karlsruhe
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