make dist considered harmful: odd gotcha with building elfutils rpms

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Frank,

On Tue, Jun 11, 2024 at 12:58:46PM -0400, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
> > >   But I think the root cause is more the continued reliance
> > > on "make dist", made necessary by the exclusion of generated autoconf*
> > > materiel in the source tree.
> > 
> > I really don't think putting generated file into git is a good idea.
> > You get all those issues that gcc, binutils and gdb have where you need
> > all this extra CI just to make sure people use the "correct" tools to
> > regenerate the files.
> 
> That need always seemed overstated.  The tools are "correct" if they
> work (to configure/build elfutils on the platforms & configurations of
> interest), even if they are not the freshest upstream or a particular
> distro version.  If some developer manages to push in an
> unsatisfactory version, any other developer (or a bot) can regen and
> fix it.  It seems to me a non-problem.

Having each committer push generated files with their own variant of
the tools causes generates updates that are hard to sanity check by
others.

Cheers,

Mark