Re: Built-in target to delete all generated files

[Russ Allbery]

Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> writes:

> My project uses maintainer-mode and I always check these generated files
> into the source code repository.  The end user might not be able to
> produce a working set of files based on whatever random autotools they
> have on their system.

I used to do this, but it quickly turned into a major annoyance.  You get
all sorts of spurious differences based on what version of the tools
people regenerating files happened to have installed and then all sorts of
obnoxious merge conflicts and related problems when trying to integrate
third-party branches.

I suspect it depends on what sort of activities you expect people using a
VCS checkout directly to be doing, and also how sophisticated of a VCS
you're using.  If you're using CVS, you basically can't do useful merges
anyway without supporting scripts and a bunch of pain, so the additional
merge conflicts from auto-generated files probably aren't making your life
much worse the way that they would in Git.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>