Re: RFC: Maintainer mode support

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28 at cam dot ac dot uk>]

On 1 Jun 2001, Tom Tromey wrote:

> I don't think putting it in the standards is so very important though.
> How could it say anything more than "this disables parts of the
> Makefile that are generally only used by maintainers"?  The parts of
> the Makefile that get disabled depend on the particular tool.

The GNU Coding Standards are meant to ensure that GNU packages are built
and installed in a uniform way.  Since use of maintainer modes differently
in different packages means that users of some packages may need to use a
maintainer mode when changing source files, and users of another package
may not need to do so when changing similar source files, the standards
need to give common guidelines on what should and shouldn't be covered by
a maintainer mode, so this is predictable to people using and changing GNU
packages.  They should also document the problems maintainer modes seek to
solve (timestamp problems after applying patches? tight version
dependencies?).

The instructions for GNU maintainers may also need clarifying where they 
say

	The purpose of having diffs is that they are small.  To keep them
	small, exclude files that the user can easily update.  For example,
	exclude info files, DVI files, tags tables, output files of Bison or
	Flex.  In Emacs diffs, we exclude compiled Lisp files, leaving it up
	to the installer to recompile the patched sources.

since, if any of these files are covered by a maintainer mode, they
shouldn't be excluded from diffs.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk