Re: [bug-libunistring] ‘cdefs.h’ missing from the distribution

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Bruno & happy new year!

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:

> Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> > The EXTRA_DIST variable was indeed lacking unistring/cdefs.in.h. Does this
>> > mean that Hydra creates its tarballs using the 'make dist' command?
>> 
>> Yes.
>> 
>> > For snapshots taken from version control, this 'make dist' rule is
>> > most often not up to date. "make", "make check", and "make install"
>> > are frequently tested during development, but "make dist" is not.
>> 
>> ... which makes it a useful test.  ;-)
>
> I disagree: It's a decision that is part of project policy, to do the 
> packaging for
> distribution either continually during development or only before a release.

Sure, though it seemed to be a good choice for other GNU projects I
looked at so far.

However, IMO a nice thing about continuous integration is that it makes
it possible to almost automate releases.  Any given revision of the
project that builds and passes the test suite can be fetched right away
from http://hydra.nixos.org/view/gnu/libunistring .  Getting that for
free or almost can be nice.

(Of course, this assumes an automatic test suite with good coverage
that’s maintained up-to-date.)

> Another point is that your way of doing "make dist" then build from it
> is not providing good error messages pointing to the origin of the problem,
> that is, a file missing from EXTRA_DIST.

Well, christmas is over, but that’d be a request for ‘bug-automake’
I think.

Thanks for your feedback!

Ludo’.