Re: Updating a package's gnulib files in CVS

[Bruno Haible]

Denver Gingerich wrote:
> > It also appears to install new files with an added "_" (ie. stdlib_.h).

You must be using a gnulib checkout that is already a month old or more?
We renamed all *_.h files to *.in.h recently.

Eric Blake wrote:
> Now for some background: there are two schools of thought on generated
> files.

And one of the two schools of thought does things in two different ways...
The three possibilities are listed in
  http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Files-under-CVS.html

> One (which Bruno subscribes to as the author of gnulib-tool, and
> which I agree with) is that all files that can be generated by tools
> available to maintainers should be omitted from your ... repository

This is the majority opinion, and gnulib-tool is made to fit this way of
doing. Personally, I still commit many autogenerated files into CVS, but
I'm not doing this for files brought by gnulib-tool, because this set of
files changes simply too often.

Denver Gingerich wrote:
> "gnulib-tool --update" creates a bunch of files I don't want, such as
> .cvsignore and backup files (ending in "~").

The backup files are created so that you cannot blame gnulib-tool for eating
your precious files. You can filter out these files from your cvs related
command, e.g.

   cvs add `find . -type f | grep -v /CVS/ | grep -v '~$'`

It's conceivable that gnulib-tool had an option for not touching the .cvsignore
or .gitignore files. But is that really worth it? Can't you exclude these
files the same way you deal with the backup files?

Bruno