2009/12/21 Rahul Sundaram <sundaram(a)fedoraproject.org>:
Hi,
I recently submitting Deja-dup, a backup program written in Vala for
review at
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=540761
Vala is described in more detail at
http://live.gnome.org/Vala. Deja-dup
like many Vala programs include both the Vala source code and the C
"source code" to avoid a build time requirement of Vala and also because
Vala is still in a rapidly evolving stage. Do I need to build from the
original Vala source code or can I consider the machine generated C as
"source"?
Is the C code something that is intended to be edited by humans later? Or is the only
place changes ever supposed to happen is in the Vala code? If it's the latter case,
it's not really the spirit of free and open to work with only the C code unless the
Vala code is included.
There's enough case precedence for including it, since autotools does more or less the
same thing with the source code that is used to build packages. Still, it's an issue
that's heavily debated, and it's something you might want to make a goal to avoid
in the future.
-Yaakov