Hello! Simon Tournier <zimon.touto...@gmail.com> skribis:
> What is the usual way to deal with these generated files? Can we > distribute them although it is not the Guix project that generates them > from source? In pure bootstrappable spirit, we should view tarballs as byproducts, not source, and thus depend only on the actual source (VCS repo). This has been discussed a few times here and there’s consensus I think that this is The Way to Go (I remember a thread started by Maxime Devos on this topic months ago). However, a practical detail: most GNU packages ship generated build machinery; building those packages from source means adding dependencies on Autoconf & co., which may prove to be tedious deep in the dependency graph. So for now, I think we should avoid tarballs produced by autotools & co. whenever doing so is simple, while postponing that for more crucial packages. In the case of ice-wm, it would seem that there’s the extra difficulty that source is scattered in different places (where are the .po files?), so perhaps that’s a case where you may want to use the tarball, possibly discussing with upstream to see if we can do better. HTH, Ludo’.
