[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Bad entries in po/POTFILES.in

[Jeff Mallatt <jjm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2001/07/03 05:46 , Thue wrote:
>On Tuesday 03 July 2001 00:27, miguel_l_l@xxxxxxxx wrote:
>> > > The file po/POTFILES.in contains a number of entries that point
>> > > to non-existent files, namely to files in the client/gui-mui/
>> > > directory, which apparently no longer exists.
>> > >
>> > > This is a problem because it causes `make update-po' to fail, so
>> > > I've just edited out those entries from po/POTFILES.in.  Is this
>> > > the correct solution?  Do you want me to update these changes to
>> > > po/POTFILES.in in the CVS repository?
>> > >
>> > > --
>> > > Miguel
>> >
>> > It works fine for me.
>> > I also looked over the files listed, and they all seem to exist.
>> >
>> > -Thue
>>
>> It's strange, but it seems that although the directory
>> client/gui-mui/ does exist in the CVS, it doesn't exist in the file
>> ftp://ftp.freeciv.org/freeciv/beta/freeciv-1.11.6.tar.bz2
>> that is linked from the front page of freeciv.org
>>
>> --
>> Miguel
>
>Yes, it doesn't exist there, because amiga doesn't use the autoconf 
>build system.
>That is somewhat unfortunate because it cripples the releases as base 
>for development, as seen above. That should be fixed.
>How about just adding a basic Makefile.am/Makefile.in/Makefile to the 
>dir, do make "make dist" work? The amiga people don't have to use it 
>for anything else.

Some history and philosophy:

The theory is that the distributions are for those people who simply want
to run Freeciv with as little effort as possible (a.k.a. "users").  For
several "other" platforms (Windows, Amiga?), this means downloading a
binary distribution -- while for the several flavors of Unix, this means
*either* a binary distribution or the source distribution.  (This is all
philosophy / opinion, and can be disagreed with and changed...)

So, since the source distribution is for Unix users building Freeciv, it
doesn't need to include code specific to "other" platforms.  We decided to
not include gui-mui because it was big enough that not including it was
something of a savings in size (we have had complaints about the size of
the distribution tarball).  We had also thought to remove some other parts
of the distribution to save size (e.g., distribute only one tileset,
distribute none of the localizations, etc.), but had not gotten around to
building a mechanism for doing this cleanly (including a way to add these
parts, for those people who wanted them).

Developers are expected to fetch a CVS snapshot, or access the CVS directly
(as explained on the How to Contribute page).  (This is not a requirement,
but the closer a patch is to being against the current CVS the more likely
it is to be examined by a writer.)

I, personally, like the idea of having a multi-part distribution, where you
could pick the parts you want.  We are definitely not there, however.

As to whether gui-mui should be included, the real question as I see it is:
How many Amiga *users* (not developers) download the source code and build
the programs in order to use Freeciv?  (Also, according to the latest poll
of which platform Freeciv is run on, Unix scored 431 to Amiga's 31.)

Beyond liking to see a multi-part distribution, I have no real opinion (my
Internet connection is fast enough that I don't care about the size of the
distribution :).  I just thought I'd provide some historical perspective.

jjm