Re: [Automake-NG] [PATCH] [ng] maintainer-mode: remove it altogether

[Stefano Lattarini]

On 08/09/2012 10:59 PM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Thu, 9 Aug 2012, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
> 
>> On 08/09/2012 08:12 PM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
>>> On Thu, 9 Aug 2012, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
>>>>>
>>>> That's why the files generated by maintainer tools should be distributed.
>>>> Once they are, and the distribution tarball gets not botched somehow, the
>>>> rules requiring such maintainer tools should not be executed on the use
>>>> machine anyway, independently from the presence or absence of maintainer
>>>> mode.
>>>
>>> There are some broken (but popular) filesystems
>>>
>> Just out of curiosity: which ones?
> 
> Windows FAT.
>
Urgh.  In my book, this falls squarely in the realm of "Doctor, it hurts
me when I do that! -- Don't do it then" ;-)

> There are packages which don't use 'make dist' to release their package
> (they use tar or zip) so timestamps may not be coherent.
>
If they want to go behind Automake's back in some areas, they can (and that
is fully legitimate in fact); but then the the burden is on them to ensure
the expected invariants are respected in those areas as well.

> This is evil but likely not related to maintainer-mode since maintainers of
> such projects would not be likely to be aware of it.
> 
> I suppose if Automake-NG removes --enable-maintainer-mode, then it is pretty
> easy to add one back.
>
Yes; and the point is that such new "package-specific" maintainer-mode would
only impact areas where it might actually be useful (your example about the
documentation been a good use case IMHO) rather than ending up mangling some
fundamental part of the build system.

Thanks,
  Stefano