[systemd-devel] no tar balls at release time

[Mike Gilbert]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 7:30 PM, Lennart Poettering
<lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
> 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?

On Gentoo, most users build from source, so this means additional
dependencies on most users' systems. We would appreciate having the
autotools-generated tarballs, but we can certainly live without them.

FYI, having to run autoreconf introduces the following dependencies for us:

        app-text/docbook-xml-dtd:4.2
        app-text/docbook-xml-dtd:4.5
        app-text/docbook-xsl-stylesheets
        dev-libs/libxslt:0
        >=dev-libs/libgcrypt-1.4.5:0"