On 30 October 2014 06:45, Arne Babenhauserheide (IMK) <arne.babenhauserhe...@kit.edu> wrote: > Am 30.10.2014 00:43, schrieb Diego Elio Pettenò: > I don’t want to change the GNU style. I want to have an easier way to > *adhere to* the existing GNU style by providing default tool support for > creating the ChangeLog and AUTHORS file from versiontracking systems.
Great. But people don't *want* to adhere to the GNU style, most people just end up creating 0-sized AUTHORS NEWS and ChangeLog files, because otherwise automake fails, and then they complain about autotools being messy and requiring useless boilerplate. > Additional motivation for this: If I want to teach someone to switch > from a simple Makefile to autotools, I have to talk about https://autotools.io/whosafraid.html For 90% of the non-library projects out there this will cover enough that is needed to start. > As you can see, how to write a conforming ChangeLog takes roughly as > much explanation as writing the configure.ac. And every new contributor > will have to learn how to do that (while the other topics are only > needed for the initial setup or for the maintainer). So here is the usual disagreement. I don't like GNU style and I think that imposing it and wasting people's time on it is not worth it at all. Again I don't have stakes on the gnu style because I don't use it. I don't want to use it. And I don't want to force anybody else to use it. I usually make people happy when I tell them you can use automake in foreign mode because then there is no 0-sized top-level file there just to make it happy. Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes flamee...@flameeyes.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/