On Jul 7, 2009, at 4:14, Sam Varshavchik <mrsam@courier-mta.com> wrote:

Richard W.M. Jones writes:

On Mon, Jul 06, 2009 at 11:09:51PM -0400, Braden McDaniel wrote:
    2. improves the resiliency of the package build to changes to
       Fedora's autotools chain.
Many projects come with public source repositories, and those don't
include the binary configure/Makefile.in files.  You usually build
those locally with a script like 'autogen.sh'.  Projects that depend
on precise versions of the autotools are just going to break under
those conditions.

Bingo. Which is why this is a rather strange (not my first, or the second, or the nth choice, but I had to spend a few minutes here picking the correct adjective that expresses the general idea, but is still somewhat diplomatic) way to publish source. And, which is why this is somewhat of a rarity, and a novelty.

libguestfs is a case in point - the Debian maintainer builds it from
git using some unknown version of autoconf, and I build it on RHEL and

This is a rare exception. For each project you can cite that releases their sources this way, I'll be happy to cite twenty others who don't.

Feel free to come up with your largest list. I'll just go through Sourceforge, and grab the first x*20 projects, in response.

Given that automake's "make dist" automatically rolls Makefile.in, and configure into the tarball (together with a bunch of other stuff), one has to go out of their way to leave them out of the tarball.

Bizarre.


These days distributing via tarball is bizarre.  Distributed source control is changing the way that projects work and release. Sure there are plenty of projects out here that don't work this way but more and more are headed in this direction. 

--
Jes