From: Daniel Stenberg (Daniel.Stenberg@frontec.se)
Date: Wed Nov 17 1999 - 02:10:59 CST
On Tue, 16 Nov 1999, Kent Landfield wrote:
> First is, the maketgz and FILES file are there for the administative
> purposes of just a couple people. They are of no use to the average
> hypermail user. Shouldn't tools like this, that are only used for
> building official distributions of hypermail, be in a separate CVS
> baseline such as one named "hypertools" ?
If they were many, big and extensive I would agree. But now, by keeping them
in the main distribution archive we allow anyone at any time to build a new
archive very easy. You could even make re-package hypermail again after you
have untared it and thrown away the original tarball and it would become an
exact copy.
> A problem with the script at present is that it does not allow to
> directly use what's in the CVS baseline.
True. I usually make a 'cvs update' in the root anyway before I go ahead and
play. I didn't want to add that dependency in maketgz, since it builds
tarballs, not necessarily tarballs with the very latest sources from the CVS
baseline. It is up to you to pick 'em.
> It also does not support tagging the CVS files that make up the
> distribution.
True. But if you don't do any magic tricks, and if you're using the latest
and fanciest sources you would simply commit everything and tag them just
after you'd run maketgz. I've done that numerous of times.
> Also the script modifies patchlevel.h that is created as part of the
> distribution. That new patchlevel.h is then not consistent with what is
> in the CVS tree.
... if you're not committing, that is true yes. I usually commit it after
the maketgz has run. Having the script do this modification makes it
absolutely sure we never release a tarball with the wrong version number
string inside.
It may not be the perfect tool yet and it may need more tweaking, I still
believe that having a tool like this that builds the archives is far better
than lots of manual steps that have to be done without mistakes every time.
> I will clean it up so it will allow you to build directly from the CVS
> baseline and tag the files that make up that distribution. That way
> there is no chance of errors by forgetting to update the FILES file to
> add or remove a file.
Well, there might be occations when the files in the FILES don't match all
the files in the CVS. There might be experiments or whatever in the CVS that
we don't include in the normal release tarball...
> It will also make it easier for people to pull out a specific version of
> according to a baseline tag.
Of course we should tag all files at all release-times.
> I'm sorry that it did not match. Hopefully these changes will make it
> easier to do everything needed in the script and provide better CVS
> baseline management as well.
I'm not convinced that such a strict connection between maketgz and the CVS
management is needed. But I'm not very much against it either. ;-)
-- Daniel Stenberg -- http://www.fts.frontec.se/~dast/ You'll find my hypermail pages at http://www.fts.frontec.se/~dast/hypermail