[GNC-dev] swig as permanent build requirement (was: Re: [GNC] UK VAT and "Making Tax Digital")

[John Ralls]

> On May 15, 2019, at 7:49 AM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> 
> Op woensdag 15 mei 2019 15:43:43 CEST schreef John Ralls:
>> OK, that all sounds reasonable.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
> 
> Glad you agree.
> 
> Remaining question is when to introduce this ? Would you do it for the next 
> stable release or on master ? I'm inclined to go for the latter as not to trip 
> up too many distro packagers in the middle of a stable series.

I agree that we don't want to mess with the release build requirements during a stable series, but why not continue to pre-swig the release tarballs?  We can distinguish between swig-foo.c being in srcdir or not to decide whether swig is required. If it's there then we're building from a pre-swigged tarball; if not then we run swig. As long as the builder follows our advice and builds in a separate directory there's no conflict as swig-foo.c goes in builddir. If that bugs you then we can remove that behavior and swigging from the dist target for 4.x.

Versioning of releases shouldn't change either: We want the release to be gnucash-3.6 and a post-release Github tarball to build gnucash-3.6-whatever.

Regards,
John Ralls