[Zlib-devel] configure script

[Mark Adler]

On Sep 18, 2011, at 9:17 AM, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
>> 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.
> Which makes it rather useless.

No, it's incredibly useful.  The single action of putting in that dummy Makefile dramatically reduced the number of emails I received, which were coming from clueless people who didn't know about configure and didn't read the README file, but did know to type "make".

> Which makes it a downstream branch. They'll have to maintain the whole
> build process (probably including changes on zconf.h) on their own anyways.

They don't modify zconf.h at all.  It works as is.  And their "whole build process" can be quite simple.  In fact, for kicks, I just tried this:

cc -c *.c
ar -r libz.a *.o

That completed just peachy, I compiled a program with the library, and it worked great!  The world doesn't always have to be complicated.  Sometimes we just decide to make it so.

> Okay, simply put the generated tree into git, in its own downstream
> branch (ontop of master). Takes a few lines of shellscript to do it
> once and for all, fully automatically.

I want the master branch to be the one that delivers an archive identical to the distribution.  If you are suggesting that the develop branch not have these files, then maybe we can do that.  Then I have to remember to put them back in just before I promote the master branch.

I haven't heard what's wrong with git update-index --assume-unchanged.

Mark