[sane-devel] 1.0.25 is out, now what?

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi Devs,

Olaf Meeuwissen writes:

> [...]
>
> One of the things that I think contributed to the long period between
> releases is the lack of a milestone, plan and/or schedule.  Alioth does
> not seem to have any kind of functionality that can help with that so I
> have set up a milestone[1] at my sane-backends GitLab clone[2].
>
>  [1] https://gitlab.com/sane-project/backends/milestones/1
>  [2] https://gitlab.com/sane-project/backends
>
> And as the current content pretty much sums things up for now, I might
> as well just copy-and-paste it:
>
>> This is a very unofficial milestone for the goals for
>> sane-backends-1.0.26.  I will update this with feedback from the
>> sane-devel mailing list.
>>
>>  - modernize the autofoo bits
> [...]
>
> I've already started on the first item in a local topic branch that I
> hope to push soonish.

OK, so that turned out to happen a bit later than anticipated.  It's
there[3] now though and you are welcome to try it out.

 [3] https://gitlab.com/sane-project/backends/tree/autotool-reform

Simply clone the repository and checkout the autotool-reform branch.  As
I don't think generated files belong in a version control system, you'll
have to run

  autoreconf

after the checkout.  That will make sure your Makefile.in files and the
aclocal.m4 file get updated.  This requires that you have autoconf and
automake installed.  Versions are declared in configure.ac and as of
writing are autoconf-2.69 and automake-1.9.

If you have any trouble with this branch, please create a new ticket[4]
or send mail to the list.  Ditto for other feedback.

 [4] https://gitlab.com/sane-project/backends/issues/new

Next steps on this branch will go through the automake, gettext and
libtool bits, in that order, one at a time.  I expect to end up with
something that requires the versions of these tools in the second half
of 2012.  That should not be too new for development setups, I think.

What I'd like to hear about most, though, is the removal of generated
files from git.  I plan to keep the extra step after checkout limited to
just an

  autoreconf -i

possibly with a -f.  If there are convincing reasons to put generated
files back under git control that can be done before the branch gets
merged.

Please note that generated files are still included in dist tarballs so
that "ordinary" users will not need any of the autotools.

Hope this helps,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
Support Free Software               Support the Free Software Foundation
https://my.fsf.org/donate                        https://my.fsf.org/join
 GnuPG key: F84A2DD9/B3C0 2F47 EA19 64F4 9F13  F43E B8A4 A88A F84A 2DD9