Hello Reuben, * Reuben Thomas wrote on Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 03:22:08PM CEST: > it has just been pointed out to me that "make dist" for current head > of GNU Zile fails, unless preceded by "make". This is because make > dist distributes a file which can only be made once the zile binary > has been built. > > I have two questions: > > 1. Is it expected that "make dist" should work without a preceding > "make"? i.e. is this really a bug?
The GNU Coding Standards usually only set requirements upon the behavior of your build system *when run from an extracted tarball*. This is crucial for being able to build from a readonly medium: imagine an extracted tarball on a CD or (more likely) on a readonly or shared mount. Then the use should be able to run configure in a temporary directory and build without an error, nor with race conditions when building in parallel in different build trees. Cheers, Ralf
