[Xcb] xcb-commit Digest, Vol 43, Issue 2

[Barton C Massey]

In message <20090217095017.GF11059 at abydos.adm.naquadah.org> you wrote:
> At 1234827726 time_t, Barton C Massey wrote:
> > Why?  These are occasionally useful to people, and don't
> > seem to hurt anything that I'm aware of.  Were they causing
> > a problem?
> 
> Packaging auto-generated stuff *is* bad and useless.

First off, thanks for doing the packaging!  And you're the
packager, so you get to be the decider here.  But I kind of
disagree... :-)

> I'll add:
> * They depends on the version of xcb-proto installed on the dist
>   tarball builder which might be corrupted, not up-to-date,
>   <insert any bad thing>
>   (that's the bad point)

Yeah, it does add an extra burden to have the packager build
against the correct xcb-proto.  But given that the packager
does so, it's nice that the user will automatically get the
right version of stuff.

> * They cannot be used anyway since configure will yell:
>   checking for XCBPROTO... configure: error: Package requirements (xcb-prot=
> o >=3D 1.1) were not met:
> 
>   No package 'xcb-proto' found
>   (that's the useless point)

Yeah, that would need to be fixed somehow.

The "obvious" solution to both of these problems is to make
the libxcb tarball always contain the correct version of
xcb-proto as well.  (The only reason they're split AFAIK is
so that folks like Antoine who only need the xcb-proto stuff
can avoid downloading the rest of it.)

Given this, the only use for shipping the generated files
would be for people with broken or non-existent Python or
its libraries, who could then go type "make install" in
xcb-proto and in libxcb and presumably avoid running Python
at all.

Shipping generated files that might be system-dependent
would be horrible, but I don't see that we'd be doing that
here?  These files should be generate-once compile-anywhere,
as near as I can determine.

> So, I guess no one ever used them, and everybody re-generates
> them anyway by installing xcb-proto.

Hard to say.  I've been known to do things by hand like
copying xcb-proto.pc into the appropriate place.  But in
general, I suspect you're right.

Anyway, I don't feel super-strongly about it.  Do what you
think is best.

And again, thanks!

    Bart