Hello! Janneke Nieuwenhuizen <[email protected]> skribis:
> Your confession of committing sacrilège though, made me reflect on this. > I grew up using rcs, cvs, arch, tla, darcs, bzr, looked at hg, and > finally git I have a similar experience, though I started with CVS and skipped Darcs and bzr. :-) And I had a similar approach to ‘ChangeLog’ files too. > Anyway, I figure that any transition away from git will be much less > lossy, if not loss-less, and as far as ChangeLog files go, we could > generate those at any time if the need arises. > > So yeah, time to also let go of generated ChangeLog files. Yeah. > Do you think it's time to replace `make dist' in Guix by some `git > archive' curse yet? Now that we choose to prefer not using tarballs in > Guix because they include generated data, wouldn't it make sense not to > provide tarballs that contain generated data? There’s a strong connection with the build system, actually. The reason Autotools were made this way is quite smart actually: it’s easy to install from a ‘make dist’ tarball since you need nothing but a POSIX shell and make, which were the things one could consider ubiquitous at the time. Builds systems that came later (CMake, Meson, etc.) did away with this convenience. That was quite risky at the time (asking users to install CMake, and the right version, before they could even install the package they’re interested in!), but in the long run, it appears to work well. And, there’s some good news! I hear fellow hackers have been working on this thing called BLUE, which could address our tarball problem as well! That is, once Guix uses BLUE as its build system, ‘make dist’ is effectively gone, and at that point it building from a Git checkout or ‘git archive’ is the normal experience. I hope this makes sense. :-) Ludo’.
