RE: What does the file extension ".hg" mean?

["Gavin Lambert" <gavinl compacsort com>]

Quoth John Emmas:
> Gtkmm's Git repo even provides MSVC build projects - even though they 
> can't be used to build from the Git sources!  I'm not sure if there's 
> really much point in them being there.

Well, I can't really speak for the GTKMM maintainers, but I imagine that
they're there primarily just so that they can end up in the tarball.
They're still source files so they have to go *somewhere* in git (and
otherwise there'd be nothing to put into the tarball), but they're not
actually intended to be used from there.  Think of them as documentation
files at that level.

It's not until the tarball is generated that they actually become
potentially useful in their own right.

You may note that the readme files also refer to the "configure" script,
which also doesn't actually exist in git, but is present in the tarball.
This is because the readme files and other docs are written from the
perspective of someone using the tarball, because that is the intended use
case.  This is not unique to GTKMM, this is standard practice for pretty
much everything that uses autotools (which is pretty much everything written
for Linux).

So again, the tarball is intended for people who just want to build and/or
use the library without modification.  Git is intended for people who want
to make changes to the library itself.  As such, the former includes some
generated files, thereby removing the need to have the tools that generate
these files available.  While the latter does require those tools, and is
less well-documented as fewer people are expected to go this route.

I know you want all of this to work straight out of git without requiring
extra tools.  But that's simply not how autotools or gmmproc projects work.
So unless you use the tarball instead, you'll just be fighting an uphill
battle.

[Also, my ISP is getting blocked from this list at the moment for some
inexplicable reason, so if you wish to respond to this then I'd appreciate
it if you quoted the whole thing.  And you might get some other opinions
this way.]