How are "official" tarballs built?

[Zach Frey <zfrey bright net>]

Since I'm one of the folks who whine about the packaging of
tarballs and RPMs so often ... :^)

In some number of days, Miguel is going to announce something
like "The 0.99.9 Belligerently Beautiful Bison release of GNOME
is now available ...", and there will be new gnome-foo-0.99.9.tar.gz
files on ftp.gnome.org and mirrors.  How are these tarballs built?

If I had to guess, I would think that they are built from a CVS
directory (probably checked out with a certain label tag), and
are the end product of "./configure; make; make dist".

Is this correct, or does it happen some other way?

I am asking so that I have a better chance of submitting patches
rather than simply bug reports in the future.


Thanks in advance,


Zach