Re: [Bug-apl] Improved contribution workflow

[Juergen Sauermann]

Hi Elias,

the reason why some generated files are in the source repository is because they may need
tools for generating them that should not be expected to be installed on the machine that compiles GNU APL.

And, of course, generated files shall never be modified directly, rather the source files from which they were
modified should be changed. A diff of those source files should suffice. Normally either a make clean or make distclean
before the diff should do the trick.

The files in the savanah repo are those in the GNU project tar file. All the Makefile and Makefile.in files are redundant,
but the decision to include them into the tar file is made by autoconf/automake. I suppose the reason is that people can
run ./configure without autoreconf since not everybody has autoconf and automake (and in particular the proper version
of them) installed.

What other generated files do create problems? I am not aware of any except the Makefiles?

As to Mercurial and git, I am really not a fan of them. Mercurial is kind of bearable because you can use it from SVN.
But the way in which people work on github is, IMHO, horrible, even though they seem to be successful. This is probably
due to my own lack of knowledge about git, but what I have seen so far is not motivating me to increase that knowledge.

I also believe that some of the current GNU APL users are not too keen on new functionalities in GNU APL. I do not at
all mind if somebody wants to use GNU APL as a starting point for the coolest language on earth, but I personally would
prefer to stay out of it. I can support people that want to understand GNU APL even if they want to create a different language.
But I doe not want to have any maintenance responsibility for such a language.

/// Jürgen

On 09/26/2017 11:29 AM, Elias Mårtenson wrote:

Hello Jürgen,

In my work to implement regex support, I realised that creating a nice diff for you is more difficult than it should be.

The main problem is caused by the fact that a lot of generated files are part of the source respository. Since I made changes to these files, I end up with a massive diff that includes all kinds of files that are not needed.

It would be nicer if these were not part of the repository, and one could simply run autoreconf -fvi manually. This is what Emacs does, and it works quite well.

It would also be nice if there was a way for an external contributor to contribute merge requests directory to the respository. This is ideally done using a distributed source control system such as Mercurial or Git, but Subversion works too, although you would have to create accounts for the other developers.

Is this something you could consider?

Regards,

Elias