[cairo] cairo packaging and Makefile.am.features

[Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult]

On 17.04.2017 23:03, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> No, we only need to regenerate build products. You can check build
> products into your version control system if you want, but that’s a
> recipe for tears and gnashing of teeth.

We (dist folks / integrators) also have to regenerate intermediate
files (especially configure script, etc), as we often have to touch
several places of the code (right now, eg., I need the drm backend of
cairo), sometimes even have to touch autoconf+friends (it's not that
long ago when libtool wasn't able to do a clean sysroot'ed cross
compiling). So, at least for a fairly amount of packages we have to
do that anyways. Some folks used to do that manually and patch in the
regenerated results, on a per-package basis, but that's time consuming
and error prone. Finally, distros extended their build machineries
to do everything automatically, and even caring whether it's really
required for a particular package in a particular versions would just
be too expensive.

> And tarballs don’t do version control.

They at least (should) define a particular base version, where people
can set their patches ontop. Any many distros still do that for
easier mirroring (especially the self-compiling ones don't wanna
clone all the individual upstream repos).


--mtx