Re: config.in

[Miles Bader]

"Eli Zaretskii" <address@hidden> writes:
> I object that we require users to install Autoconf and Automake just
> to build Emacs.  Those are tools for developers, not for users.

This is not what's being suggested.  Anyone who checks emacs out of
CVS is basically not a normal user, and it's perfectly reasonable to
expect them to have normal GNU tools.

Note that even if these generated files are included, they may _still_
need the auto* programs, because CVS makes no attempt to preserve
timestamps, and the Makefile will attempt to regenerate the files
anyway (though the checked-out contents are actually `up to date').

> IMHO it doesn't make sense to go through all that just to save us the
> ``cost'' of a 25KB file.

The `cost' is not 25KB, it's all the annoyance of constantly having to
fight with CVS getting confused because a file got regenerated locally
which then doesn't match the CVS version.  In my case, this also ends
up making CVS updates take much longer because CVS ends up resending
all the `changed' files back to the server over my slooow connection.
This is all stupid, and it's not how things are supposed to work.

If people on MSDOS or whatever have a harder time to regenerate these
files, then we can find some other solution, but the default should be
what's good for GNU systems, which are by far the majority among
developers.

-Miles
-- 
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      for reasons of military security.