Re: Generated files and patch systems
Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> writes:
> On Sun, 2008-05-25 at 13:19 +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
>> If you run autotools at build time you should also ensure that the
>> changes which autotools makes are reverted in the clean target. This
>> means that your diff doesn't get cluttered with automatically generated
>> things and ensures that repeated builds of the package produce the same
>> diff.gz.
> I haven't seen any other packages doing that - is there an example
> involving aclocal.m4 somewhere?
Lots of other packages do this -- one of mine off the top of my head is
xml-security-c.
> I really don't want to do all that for the tmpl/* files as well - I
> don't see the need, copying dozens of files into foo.safe or
> foo.upstream and then moving them back?
Just delete them then.
The point is to not put mechanically generated changes in the diff, since
it makes it much harder to review what the maintainer has actually done.
I think most people take the approach of just deleting such files in the
clean target, which will exclude their changes from the diff.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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