Re: autogen?

[Christian Lynbech <chl@tbit.dk>]

>>>>> "Maciej" == Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@MIT.EDU> writes:

Maciej> This way, if you want to reproduce an old situation, you look
Maciej> at HACKING and see which versions of the tools you should use,

True, but how do you get hold of that old version of autoconf? I would
much prefer having the necessary information kept right in the
repository rather than having to hunt some old obsolete no-good
version of autoconf, just to do a test.

Obviously, these kind of what-if discussions are kind of difficult,
because in the ideal world, you will never need to go back. I'll leave
as a exercise for the reader to demonstrate that we do live in an
ideal world.

More seriously. I have actually used this going back thing. 

I have had a suspicion that guile was leaking performance. Somehow the
august snapshot I was working with seemed much slower than the march
snapshot I used previously. So I simply checked out a series of
versions in order to do some simple benchmarks.

This would not have been impossible to do under a autogen regime, but
it certainly would have been a darned pain in the neck if one also had
to juggle with differing versions of autoconf and automake.

(and no, I found no suspicious tendencies)

Maciej> and users accessing CVS directly know what version they need.

How is this. If I need to try out a 6 month old snapshot, I have no
chance of remembering which version of the tools was in use back
then. I better hope that it is properly recorded somewhere.

In fact just writing it into HACKING isn't so hot. Any manual
procedure will fail at some point, according to Murphys Law.

Maciej> (This is not necessarily an issue for snapshots, and
Maciej> definitely not one for releases).

I still would feel much safer, if I were the project administrator, if
I knew that I could extract a certain release directly from the
repository. Extracting a set of files and then having to regenerate
some files that was distributed to the outside public, hoping they
would be the same, just isn't a reassuring strategy IMHO.


---------------------------+--------------------------------------------------
Christian Lynbech          | Telebit Communications A/S                       
Fax:   +45 8628 8186       | Fabrik 11, DK-8260 Viby J
Phone: +45 8628 8177 + 28  | email: chl@tbit.dk --- URL: http://www.telebit.dk
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Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
                                        - petonic@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)