On another front:
most still reach for `make dist` which in my
opinion should have never created a compressed archive
Indeed, we can't change what "make dist" does now, but we could add a
"make dist-tar" (and/or "make dist-ar") which, besides creating the
.[t]ar archive, does not create the .gz-compressed file.
However, I doubt it's worth the pain. gzip is a tiny package, after all,
and ubiquitous.
With the advent of AM_OPTIONAL_AUTOMAKE, we could potentially even
recommend that maintainers use it for all the dist-* forms. The only
downside I see is that when maintainers intend to actually distribute a
foo.tar.whateverz, they'll have to have some logic somewhere that checks
it was created by a make dist used to make the final distribution files,
i.e., that they didn't forget to install the whateverz package, since
Automake wouldn't tell them any more. --best, karl.
