Ulf Lamping wrote:
You mention that the INSTALL file does not "belong" to subversion
checkouts, which is a good idea. Add similar to INSTALL.configure?
That might make sense.
Would it be a good idea to add info what do to instead (pointing to the
right document)?
As long as seeing that at the beginning of the document doesn't cause
people who've just downloaded the Ethereal source to go there, read the
instructions, try them, and end up with the process failing because they
don't have all the tools necessary to build from SVN.
BTW: Is it a good idea anyway to have two different ways to distribute
the sources? This seems to be an endless source of confusion and sounds
a bit strange in my ears :-)
Well, SVN really doesn't "distribute" the sources, it just stores them
and their revision history.
The tarballs include some files that are generated from the source in
SVN, because we don't want to require people who only want to build
Ethereal and install it, without changing it, to have *all* the
necessary tools (Bison, Flex, Python, autoconf, automake, etc.). This
is somewhat of a tradition with UNIX source tarballs - they assume the
presence of a C compiler, "make", and a few other tools, but not
YACC/Bison, Lex/Flex, autoconf, automake, etc..
We don't want to check the results of that into SVN, however, as that
means that if they're changed they'd have to be regenerated and the
result of that checked in, and that doesn't always happen in practice.
So the tarball includes stuff not checked into SVN, and there are
reasons why the tarball includes them (we don't want to require the user
to have all the stuff we have) and why SVN doesn't (so that they don't
have to be regenerated and checked in if the stuff that generates them
is changed).
