=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Bj=F6rn?= Persson <bjorn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > The Packaging Guidelines require that all binary programs and libraries be > built from source code. How should this requirement be interpreted when some > of the "source code" is itself automatically generated from other sources? > [ details snipped ] > Thus, none of the stated reasons seem to be relevant to this case, and I can > see only one thing that could mean that I have to run the code generation as a > part of the build, namely the term "source code". You are overlooking one good reason for running the code generator during package build: it ensures that what you compile actually matches the sources it's claimed to be generated from. I've seen more than a few cases where allegedly-automatically-built derived files shipped in an upstream tarball were not up to date. Now, whether it's worth doing that during package build is a tradeoff. You have to think about what are the odds that this particular upstream could screw up in that fashion; depending on how much you know about their tarball creation and testing process, you might legitimately conclude that the odds of this scenario are too small to worry about. (Or you might be able to convince yourself that if the files *were* out of sync, you'd get a compile failure; this seems possibly relevant here, depending on how tightly tied these files are to the GTK+ API.) And you have to consider how much time it adds to the package build and whether the code generator's own needs will materially bloat the package's BuildRequires footprint. These costs are probably substantial, else upstream would not have chosen to ship derived files in the first place. It might be worth it, or it might not. Anyway, this is just to point out that regenerating derived files does sometimes have practical value, quite independent of how narrowly somebody wants to read the "build from source" policy. regards, tom lane -- packaging mailing list packaging@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/packaging
