On Fri, Dec 29, 2023 at 07:47:29PM +0100, Omar Polo wrote:
> Just a parethesis: among the various bad things that can be said about
> autoconf, when they got something right I feel it's deserved to be
> advertised.  In a autoconf-based project, you get for free the `make
> dist' target which produces a distribution tarball named
> project-version.tar.gz ready for distribution.
> 
> With `make distcheck' it will also run your regress suite and some
> internal checks (like being able to build from a read-only source tree)
> before producing said distribution tarball.
> 
> With this distribution tarball, you're not forcing the dependencies on
> autoconf, automake, libtool, yacc etc on the users.  They only need sh,
> make and cc available (usually.)

Given this, the point made by naddy and Mark Jamsek about better
leaving such tasks to external tools becomes stronger. When autotools
are already generating the tarball then the design I porposed would
not be useful in autoconf-based projects anyway.

Perhaps we should really leave this task to build systems rather
than the version control system? Does anyone know whether cmake
or other build tools already offer equivalent features?