[Pkg-shadow-devel] out of my depth

[Serge E. Hallyn]

On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 02:25:02AM -0500, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> 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".

Right, let's look at it this way - shadow is meant to be used by all
distros, including very minimalist ones.  As such, supporting autoconf
etc is fine, but requiring it to build may not be.

I like the idea of being able to take the most minimalist busybox/suckless/
whatever chroot I can come up with, get the shadow release tarball, and
buld it - without autotools.

> >> 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.

I agree.  Thanks for your input.

>   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

thanks,
-serge