Re: Updating a package's gnulib files in CVS

[Jim Meyering]

Simon Josefsson <address@hidden> wrote:

> address@hidden (Karl Berry) writes:
>
>>     The three possibilities are listed in
>>     http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Files-under-CVS.html
>>
>> There's another possibility, which apparently both you and I follow in
>> different ways: commit some (but not all) autogenerated files.
>> It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing decision.
>> For my purposes, it's useful not to commit gnulib files; for your
>> purposes, I can see how the opposite is true.
>
> That is what I do in my projects too: I commit gnulib files, but not
> other "generated" files.  The problem I have with switching to any other
> mode is reproducibility.  When checking out an old version of my
> software, how can I be sure to get the appropriate gnulib files?  How do
> others that use the bootstrap tool solve this problem?
>
> The way I see this working could be: in configure.ac (or possibly
> gnulib-cache.m4) I put a
>
> gl_REVISION([abc6ba7cb8ac9acb9acd..])
>
> which would be the git revision of gnulib to check out.  Then some tool
> -- possibly build-aux/bootstrap? -- could check out that version.  Then
...

For a git-based project, consider making gnulib a submodule
(see git-submodule(1)).  That's what I expect to do with coreutils.