On 10/21/18 7:56 PM, Allan McRae wrote:
On 22/10/18 8:57 am, Eli Schwartz wrote:
Also, most projects ship prebuilt man pages. I think some GNU ones commit the built page to the tree, so that could be an option.
Both those things are also true about the configure and Makefile.in files...
That is another good reason not to use git archive to create release tarballs.
Well, the point I'm trying to make here is that they're connected. They ship prebuilt man pages because they're already forced into using make dist in order to generate the build system. The egregiously offensive ones even commit their autotools results to git which is pure madness... It's not pure madness to check manpages into git, but it also doesn't seem like a hugely important thing. Excepting projects that only provide troff-formatted manpages from the start, and autotools project where it doesn't prove anything, how many are left that provide pregenerated manpages? ... Anyway, given this patch is meant to provide an alternative to autotools, if we ever stop generating autotools dist tarballs it is because we don't need configure/Makefile.in anymore, in which case arguing based on that merit will be obsolete, and the only question to consider is the doc files specifically. For which we'll need to ask the question, did we ever need them in the first place or were we just used to having them as a byproduct of the previous build system requirements. I guess we have time to think about how to fully implement a dist target for meson, after getting it completed as a valid build target first... -- Eli Schwartz Bug Wrangler and Trusted User