RFC: Do we need to keep configure, src/depend, etc in CVS?

[Steve Youngs]

* Stephen J Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

  > Many projects do not keep maintainer-generated files like configure
  > and src/depend in CVS.  CVS users are expected to have tools like
  > autoconf (to generate configure) and perl (to run the script that
  > generates src/depend) available.

  > Would it be an inconvenience to anyone if we CVS remove'd these files
  > from the XEmacs repository?  Of course the beta and stable tarballs
  > would continue to provide such files.

  > It's not obvious that there would be a great advantage to do so.  But
  > I'm considering providing a bootstrap.mk file or a script so that you
  > can do "make -f bootstrap.mk" and get all of the generated files
  > updated.  make beta could depend on this.  This might make the build
  > process somewhat more reliable.

  > Comments welcome!

I strongly believe that a source repo is no place for _any_ generated
file.  At SXEmacs we got rid of all the generated files from the repo
(including auto-autoloads, custom-loads, finder-inf etc).[1]  We don't
provide any "bootstrap" make targets or scripts.  A user just...

  $ tla (register-archive, get) the repo
  $ autoconf RET
  $ ./configure [opts] RET
  $ make RET

All the files that need to be generated are generated at either
configure or compile time.

We've had no major problems with this.

Footnotes: 
[1]  I think we still need to nuke config.values.somethingorother.

-- 
|---<Steve Youngs>---------------<GnuPG KeyID: A94B3003>---|
|                 I am Dyslexic of Borg.                   | 
|    Fusistance is retile. Your arse will be laminated.    |
|------------------------------------<steve at sxemacs.org>---|
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