Re: Octave-Forge: requirement for a maintainer Makefile for release

[Mike Miller]

On Tue, Dec 13, 2016 at 23:47:29 +0100, Oliver Heimlich wrote:
> I just found out that a fresh “hg clone” would put new timestamps on
> each file.  Timestamps would be arbitrary (or in the order in which the
> files are created in the new workspace).
> 
> Thus, if I put generated files under version control: It might happen
> that these files get recreated by Make although they are up to date.
> 
> Any idea on how to solve this?

Yeah, don't do that! :)

I haven't been following this thread very closely, but your previous
message looked like it was making the case for *not* checking in
generated files. I am strongly in favor of version control only
containing non-generated files, for quite a few reasons.

I think it's ok for a package to have "maintainer dependencies", and
some maintainer build process, that are needed to transform the pristine
source into a released package artifact. In particular, running TeX to
build the user manual, running a parser generator like bison, or running
an interface generator like swig, seem to me like prime candidates for
processes that you may not want every user to have to run, but you
certainly don't want to store their outputs in your version control.

-- 
mike