purpose and value of MANIFEST

[Jonathan Leto]

Howdy,

> It's less obvious what to substitute for the MANIFEST when building the
> tarball. You need a list of files that aren't generated, repository garbage
> (like .gitignore), or otherwise intended to be left out.  The list is piped
> into tar in the 'make release' target. The list could be manually
> maintained, but that's an enormous pain and even more error-prone than what
> we have now. If there is some way to generate this list from git metadata,
> it would be better than a manual list, but the overall implementation could
> be completely different than the one we currently use with SVN.

We definitely don't want to manually maintain it. I think MANIFEST can
be directly
generated from git metadata. It is basically the list of files under
version control,
minus a few things like .gitignore and a few generated files that we keep
under version control. Which begs the question, why are we keeping generated
stuff under version control? It is usually not necessary and makes
some diffs unnecessarily
large and hard to wade through.


Duke


-- 
Jonathan "Duke" Leto
jonathan at leto.net
http://leto.net