BUILDING_FROM_VCS

[Eric Siegerman]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 11:36:13PM +0100, Geert Janssens wrote:
> Make dist is called all the time by developers to test the creation of a dist tarball, so the info would get updated more frequently then intended. Or it would require manual intervention,  which brings us back at square one. 

I think I was unclear.  What I was trying to say was that any changes to (or exclusions of) the sentinel file should occur *only* in the distribution tarball (or whatever); the file in the source tree shouldn't be modified by "make dist".[*]  (That might be non-trivial for an in-source-tree build, but you recommend against those anyway.)

[*] That's why the source-tree version shouldn't say "I'm from git commit 123abc", but should statically say merely "I'm from git".

> Unfortunately it does matter. Github allows you to download any commit as a tarball. That tarball would also include the sentinel...

This, however, does seem to be a showstopper for the idea :-(

  - Eric