Re: make distcheck in tinderbox [was Re: make check failures- gnome-vfs, e-d-s, at-spi]

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

Hi,

On Mon, 2005-07-18 at 14:34 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-07-18 at 20:23 +0200, Ikke wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-07-18 at 13:28 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> > > > I think the advantages of adding make distcheck are bigger than the
> > > > disadvantages.
> > > 
> > > OK, but what are they? :)
> > Making sure people doing anonymous cvs checkouts will at any time be
> > able to build the package they co, not running in major autotool
> > problems just before a release tarball should be made,...
> > 
> 
> I think that ensuring that make distcheck works at release time is the
> maintainers responsibility. It is only important that it works at the
> time the release is made. There is little value in being pestered about
> every time a checkin temporarily breaks make distcheck, e.g. because a
> new symbol was added without adding it to gtk.symbols. 

	I think I'm with Matthias on this - make distcheck shows plenty of
issues that aren't going to affect anyone in reality, and no maintainer
wants to be pestered every day about the latest random thing that's
gotten screwed up.

	If people want to distribute snapshots from CVS, then "make dist" will
do fine. If the resulting tarball can't be built, then *they* can report
*that* issue. That's going to involve a lot less problems reported and
maintainers can be confident that by fixing the issues they're actually
doing something useful.

Cheers,
Mark.