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

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu>]

On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, Mark McLoughlin wrote:

> 	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.

I don't quite agree here.  'make distcheck' mainly checks things
like building in a different directory, or from readonly source
base, which are quite useful to packagers and distro people.  And
the point is that, if a package passes make distcheck, then any
future break would be a one-line fix of adding a file to the
Makefile or something like that.  If fixing it is a bigger
problem, like redoing part of the build system in another way,
then that would better be fixed sooner than just before the
release.


> Cheers,
> Mark.

--behdad
http://behdad.org/