[Zlib-devel] configure script

[Mark Adler]

On Sep 18, 2011, at 8:05 AM, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> A ./configure call is needed nevertheless for generating a proper Makefile.

The Makefile that's there is not a proper make file.  As I said, what it does is tell the user trying to use make to use configure first.

> If somebody's really so silly to write his own Makefile and still using
> the shipped zconf.h file, he's already in the role of a downstream branch
> maintainer (no matter if he's aware of that or not), and should be up
> on is own to generated a proper zconf.h (or simply copy zconf.h.in).

No, this silly person may simply be someone compiling on a system that doesn't deal in make files, scripts, etc.  All they want to do is just use their C compiler to compile the source.  So the source should all be there.  It makes no sense to add a mysterious hurdle for them: to discover that they need to copy zconf.h.in to zconf.h.

> And *IF* you really want to support backwards compatibility for those
> folks, simply copy it over on release tarball generation (trivial).

I want what is pulled from github to be the same as the release tarball, to avoid having to support two different distributions.

My requirements are simple:

1.  The release tarball shall contain the dummy Makefile and zconf.h.

2.  The archive generated from github shall be the same as the release tarball.

git is a very sophisticated and versatile system.  I'm sure that there is a way to accommodate these requirements and to avoid unnecessary cruft in statuses and commit all's.  Is there something wrong with the already suggested update-index --assume-unchanged?

Mark