[Pkg-shadow-devel] out of my depth

Mike Frysinger vapier at gentoo.org
Thu Dec 1 07:25:02 UTC 2016


On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 6:45 PM, Bálint Réczey wrote:
> 2016-11-27 9:02 GMT+01:00 Mike Frysinger:
>> On 25 Nov 2016 13:42, Serge E. Hallyn wrote:
>>> On Tue, Nov 22, 2016 at 02:23:56AM +0100, Bálint Réczey wrote:
>>> > Please don't use make dist.
>>>
>>> Huh.  That's the first time I've heard that suggestion.
>>
>> it's a bad suggestion in this case.  some people try to be super strict
>> in that the releases are always reproducible from git.  while that might
>> work for some projects, it doesn't for ones that use a generated build
>> system like autotools.  in order to pull it off, you'd have to actually
>> commit the generated output (e.g. "configure" and "config.h.in" and all
>> the rest) to git which is an even worse idea.
>
> I may not have been clear enough, but I had no intention to suggest
> storing generated files in git. This would be a bad idea. I would like to ask
> for basing the Debian package on a tarball _not_ containing generated
> files such as Makefile.in.

i have no opinion at all how Debian wants to maintain their .deb sources

> Reviewing changes when autogenerated files pollute the diff is harder
> and shadow is an important package.

yes, but as a general thing, always rebuilding autotools from scratch
is kind of wasteful and can be a pain when the sources aren't kept up
to date (and you try to use newer autotools which have new
warnings/errors).  i'm not familiar with how Debian typically builds
things though, so maybe that's "normal".

>> so when making shadow releases, you should be using `make distcheck`.
>> you can then attach the tarball to the github page under the releases
>> section.
>
> Why? Who can't use the git archive output?

forcing all users of shadow to build autotools from scratch is
fundamentally wrong.  it defeats the entire purpose of autotools.  if
*you* don't want to use them, then fine, don't, but Debian is not the
entire ecosystem.

make sure you don't conflate "what's good or makes sense for Debian"
with "this is standard open source release behavior".  while the
shadow upstream git repo is utilizing Debian infra now, it doesn't
mean the shadow sources and release behavior should be specific to
Debian.
-mike



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