Re: New GnomeGoal proposal: InstalledTests

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 1:56 AM, Colin Walters <walters verbum org> wrote:

On Fri, 2013-04-26 at 18:49 +0200, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 04/26/2013 05:01 PM, Colin Walters wrote:
> > On Fri, 2013-04-26 at 10:32 -0400, Dan Winship wrote:
> >> I want "make distcheck" to still run all of my tests, to guarantee that
> >> everything works correctly when built from a tarball, not just when
> >> built from git.
> >
> > That's going to be a high bar to jump; but I suppose it makes sense to
> > have both during the transition and give downstreams time to teach their
> > build systems about revision control.
>
> I'm not sure I follow here. Are you implying that you want to stop making
> tarballs eventually?

Yes.

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2013-April/msg00038.html

We're not all on that mailing list (I would venture to say only a select few

people who are part of the release-team are on that list).

Frankly I think it's a really bad idea to expect people to build from git,

prepackaged tarballs are much easier to build.

What is the point of configure.ac without a tarball ? with no tarball
you unconditionally require that the m4s for every dependency,
even a soft dependency be present (because the m4s for soft

dependencies are required to actually build the configure script).

Not to mention, build mechanisms generally use tarballs and prefer
them (eg. buildroot, sure you can configure packages to download
from git, etc, but it's generally an overhead vs. downloading a nice
standard tarball which you know will build as you expect it to,
every time).

If you want to remove our shell accounts, please provide us with
an alternative way of publishing our tarballs (and do give us a heads
up on d-d-l before hand, so we can collect anything which we might
be keeping in our $(HOME) and $(HOME)/public_html).

Cheers,

    -Tristan