[screen-devel] Minor issues to avoid when building the GNU Screen release tar ball in the future

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

this is _not_ to bash Amadeusz' work on GNU Screen.

In contrary: I'm very glad and thankful that he pulled GNU Screen out
of its lethargy and maybe even attracted some new contributors. :-)

And I'm also glad to see a second person (Alexander) going through
open bug reports and applying fixes since recently.

Thanks to all who contributed to GNU Screen, especially those who
contributed only recently!

There happened a few mishaps during building the 4.2.1 release tar
ball which partially are not catchable by the build system, so I want
to list them here, maybe as check list for the 4.3.0 tar ball
building:

* Makefile still contained the previous release version number which
  especially breaks the "clean" target. So the common packager's
  workflow of Apply patches → Build → Unapply Patches → Clean the
  working directory fails.

  → Please check that all occurrences (except change log, history,
    etc.) of 4.2.0, 4.2.1 and 4.2.2 are changed to 4.3.0 before
    building the release tar ball.

  (Yes, this case wouldn't show up if the Makefile wouldn't have been
  shipped in the release tar ball at all. See below.)

* Take care that files which do not belong into a release tar ball are
  not included.

  + Cache files in the release tar ball:

    autom4te.cache/output.0
    autom4te.cache/output.1
    autom4te.cache/requests
    autom4te.cache/traces.0
    autom4te.cache/traces.1

  + Files generated by calling configure:

    config.h
    config.log
    config.status
    doc/Makefile
    Makefile

  + Editor backup files: 

    config.h.in~

  + One more case which I noticed, because the file is included, but
    deleted during the clean (or realclean/distclean) target:

    doc/screen.info

    This is likely discussable if it belongs into a release tar ball.
    I'd say no, but I won't argue much about it. :-)

Tools I find useful for such QA checks: tardiff
(http://tardiff.coolprojects.org/) to compare the file list with the
previous release tar ball and "als" from atool
(http://www.nongnu.org/atool/) to comfortably check the list of
contained files independent of the actual file format and compression
type.

Thanks for considering! All the packagers of GNU Screen will be
thankful for clean release tar balls, I'm sure! :-)

In my case I'll be able to drop these files from the packaging for
Debian:

https://sources.debian.net/src/screen/4.2.1-3/debian/README.source/
https://sources.debian.net/src/screen/4.2.1-3/debian/patches/00-fix-version-in-Makefile.patch/
https://sources.debian.net/src/screen/4.2.1-3/debian/clean/ (at least parts of 
it)

                Kind regards, Axel
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