On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 9:37 AM, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > David Aldrich <david.aldr...@emea.nec.com> writes: > >> I have setup Sphinx for my Python project. We keep all our code and >> documentation in Subversion. > > It's a good idea to keep *source* files in VCS. > > It's a bad idea to keep automatically-generated files in VCS; it's > especially bad to do so if they need to be generated again after > changing the source files.
While I broadly agree, I would say this is a case of code smell rather than something outright verboten. There are a few situations where it's easier to commit the generated files as well; for instance, it can help you get around a bootstrapping problem - you use a previous build of Python to generate the frozen importlib, I think, and use that to build the next Python. (If that's not how CPython is built, my apologies; there are other projects that _do_ use this method, so it's just a flawed example.) If you don't commit the generated files, someone who wants to build from source has to first pick up a precompiled binary or somesuch. (Or, looking the other way: Disallowing generated files in source control restricts the generator to something that's already available on every build system.) But yes, as a general rule, I prefer to list all generated files in .gitignore or equivalent. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
