Re: [RFC] DISTLIST and gendistlist.sh

[Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>]

On Tue, 2008-09-02 at 13:12 +0200, Felix Zielcke wrote:
> Am Samstag, den 30.08.2008, 22:11 -0400 schrieb Pavel Roskin:
> 
> > 
> > svn ls -R | sed '/\/$/d' | sort > DISTLIST2
> 
> Thanks for the regexp.
> The sort is actual not needed, `svn' does this and it places even the
> files with a capital letter above everything else just like
> gendistlist.sh.

If we are going to keep DISTLIST in the repository, I would not rely on
that.  I think it would be best to set locale to C and use sort to make
sure that the entries are sorted in the same way for all users.

But if we are going to remove DISTLIST from the repository, then the
order doesn't matter, so sort won't be needed.

> > > This seems to be the best then nobody needs to remember to
> > > update ./gendistlist.sh and current DISTLIST seems again already a bit
> > > out of date ;)
> 
> > Thus, we don't need any lists for included or excluded files.  Things
> > will change if we stop keeping dependent files in Subversion.
> 
> This was just a little hint from me that some files were recently again
> added to SVN without adding them to DISTLIST by e.g. calling
> gendistlist.sh
> But that's the point why I do this whole thing now :)
> 
> Attached is now a patch which adds ./gendistlist.sh call to autogen.sh
> and uses SVN in case it is avaible to generate it.
> 
> I think this now needs the decision of Marco and Okuji because the
> DISTLIST file is actual used by them i.e. `make dist'

If I was releasing GRUB, I would avoid using DISTLIST even temporarily.
I would use a separate script for making releases that would:

1) call "svn export" to create a clean tree
2) create generated files
3) remove non-distributable files (e.g. gendistlist.sh)
4) package the tree

> I think using `svn ls' is really great.
> But 2 questions come now in my mind:
> 
> `make dist' already creates DISTLIST if it does not exist, so
> should ./autogen.sh generate it or directly `make dist'
> 
> should autogen.sh/`make dist' use directly SVN or should it be in
> gendistlist.sh?
> 
> Especially should ony SVN be used to generate it or should `make dist'
> be actual supported for everyone?

I think the best approach would be to allow everyone with a svn
directory create the release tarball.  This way, many people will be
able to test the release process.  The requirement to having Subversion
is not really a big deal, and it saves the need to keep DISTLIST in the
repository.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin