On Thu, 16 Jul 2026 13:32:00 +0200 Gabriel Wicki <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi! Hi, > Preparing to push 5240 I stumble over the fact that I don't really > know what gnu/local.mk is really about. I've seen patches being > registered there but I was unable to find the relevant documentation > as to why that is. The PR seems to work fine even without > registering the patch. > > I figure this is a autotools/autoconf/automake thing, but was unable > to figure out where it comes from. It is documented in Automake as dist_* in the "Fine-grained Distribution Control". Here it works fine because you use git. This dist_* controls what goes into the release tarball if the tarball is made with autotools (make dist). This 'make dist' does work without git, it can also include generated files if needed (to make bootstrap easier), etc, and autotools also brings in automatic tests (make distcheck) if you use dist_* to build and check tarball versions (so it does something similar to ./configure && make && make check with the tarball if I recall well, it might also do autoreconf -vfi or something like that before but I'm unsure). The 'git archive' command is a popular alternative to all that but it only archives files tracked by git and it requires git to work (it cannot work with a tarball or another revision control system). It also doesn't come with automatic tests. Denis.
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