Hello! Olivier Dion <[email protected]> skribis:
> On Tue, 10 Mar 2026, Ludovic Courtès <[email protected]> wrote: >> Nice! I’m looking at ‘tarball.scm’ and it’s not entirely clear what >> ‘inputs’ contains: can it be more than just the list of source files >> (checked in)? I would expect no? > > Inputs is a list of: > > - A source file (string) > - Another buildable (object base dependency tracking; e.g. a template-file) > - An external dependency (e.g. something resolved by pkg-config) [...] Nice, thanks for explaining! Would the default be to include BLUE itself in the tarball? >> Put differently, when would one ask BLUE to create a tarball instead of >> using ‘git archive’? > > I see some cases: > > - The project is not using Git but another VCS. > > - Git archive is not flexible enough for what is required > > - The wanted compression format is not supported by Git > > Otherwise, `git-archive(1)' is flexible enought to do a lots of things. Yeah and it emits plain tar, so one can use whatever compressor they want. My question in the context of this thread is whether BLUE might end up recreating ‘make dist’, which is convenient in many ways but leads people to distribute tarballs that contain pre-built artifacts. I think we should try to discourage tarballs that contain pre-built artifacts. In practice, if one is expected to have BLUE installed to build a given package, a tarball doesn’t bring much anyway compared to a VCS checkout. Thanks, Ludo’.
