[systemd-devel] no tar balls at release time

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 23.06.15 01:21, Kay Sievers (kay at vrfy.org) wrote:

> We currently considering to stop creating release tar balls.
> 
> For build systems which still require them, they can be created
> locally from the upstream git repository with:
>   git archive --format=tar --prefix=systemd-$(VERSION)/ $(VERSION) | \
>     xz > systemd-$(VERSION).tar.xz
> 
> These tar balls will not include the "500k of shell scripts" added by
> autotools. These files need to be added to the extracted tarball by
> running ./autogen.sh.
> 
> These tar balls will also not include any generated content like
> fonts, man, html pages. This is intentional.

Which of course means the build tools for all of these need to be
around on the build machines, as *everything* will be rebuilt from
scratch now. Specifically you need
autoconf/automake/python/perl/m4/xsltproc/... on every build machine.

Hence the question to ask is: is anyone downstream relying on the
pre-built stuff, and has a very good reason why he couldn't just
install the build tools on his build machine and build things with
that?

Are there any other reasons why the automake tarball would be
preferable over the git archive tarball?

Lennart