Re: Autotools-generated 'configure' & 'Makefile.in' considered binaries?

[Maxime Devos <maximedevos@telenet.be>]

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Small clarification to old discussion:

Hello,

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Hi!
>
> Maxime Devos <maximedevos@telenet.be> skribis:
>
>> Ludovic Courtès schreef op vr 01-04-2022 om 10:58 [+0200]:
>>> As a first milestone, maybe we could start running ‘autoreconf’
more
>>> often, for packages higher in the graph.  We could change the
>>> ‘bootstrap’ build phase to do that unless it’s explicitly turned
off.
>>> It may turn out to be a Sisyphean task though…
>>>
>>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Changing all pre-existing packages, maybe.  But doing this for new
>> packages (reducing review effort) and perhaps when a package is
updated
>> (for purity) should be feasible I think?  Then gradually things
would
>> improve and eventually(TM) doing the switch in the bootstrap phase
may
>> become feasible ...
>
> Yes, we could do that as a first step (in fact it’s already happening
as
> some projects no longer distribute tarballs).
>
> What do maintainers think of that policy?

No strong opinion, but I agree that having a complete development
environment capable of building from the bare sources (e.g. a git tree)
is useful in general.  On the other hand, using tarballs is often
more efficient and practical (it's made to be built by downstream
users,
rather than by developers, so it includes everything needed).  Release
tarballs are also often signed by the projects, which is neat.  So
perhaps we can leave some flexibility there and not make it a hard
rule, but a case of best judgment?

We can both use tarballs _and_ unbundle/regenerate, no need to switch
from tarball to git (though that's one way to do things)!  E.g., adjust
the bootstrap phase to always "autoreconf -vif" and/or add snippets or
post-unpack phases to remove generated or bundled Autotools files.

Greetings,
Maxime.

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