Re: Integration of git-based release workflow into "make dist"

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Roger,

* Roger Leigh wrote on Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 01:07:39AM CEST:
> What can automake do?
> 
> This is a rough outline of what I'd like to do (unless someone beats
> me to it!)
> 
> • Add a dist-git option and Makefile target.
>   This will cause $distdir to be injected into git, rather than just
>   calling tar as for other git targets.

For those bits that are pure additions, it should be possible, as a
test, to just write these rules out in your toplevel Makefile.am, for
your specific project.  Doing so once, and looking at the result and its
semantics can greatly help eliminate design errors.

IOW, show exactly what rules you would like automake to generate for
you, and which other things change, that make it much easier to comment
on.  Then, as long as these changes are pure additions (rather than
changes to existing generated text), it is easy to try them out for a
while in a couple of projects and gain experience with them.

> • This will require some additional options in order to work correctly:
>   · A branch name (the head to append the new tree to)
>   · [optional] Tag name, could be a pattern such as dist/$(VERSION)
>   · [optional] Flag for signing the tag or not
>   . [optional] Template commit message
>   These could all just be variables in the top-level Makefile.am.

As to package versioning, see this discussion and references therein:
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.automake.general/10720>
as well as the approach currently used in gnulib's GNUmakefile.
(I still haven't gotten very far with a nonworking patch on this.)

The gnulib machinery also has sample rules for distribution in maint.mk;
it is helpful to look at them and see what different semantics you need
etc.

Cheers,
Ralf