Files in the git repository

[ppisar]

I have two suggestions to how the git repository is organized:

(1) There is toplevel rwhoisd directory. It's unnecessary. Could you move all the file one level up and remove the rwhoisd directory so that configure.ac is directly at the top of the git repository?

(2) The repository tracks generated file like "configure" file. This is wrong because once you touch configure.ac, the configure file will become invalid and it changes a lot and that will produce hard to read patches as they will contain generated lines. Please remove the generated files (./configure, ./regexp/Makefile) from the git repository.

[Schievel1]

It is absolutely normal to have configure scripts and deliver them with the source. Users and maintainers usually use the configure script that comes with the source and only if its necessary run autoreconf etc.

[ppisar]

It's normal to have pregenerated configure scripts in release tar archives. But not in git source tree. This is what "make dist" does.

[Schievel1]

I see your point that configure scripts shouldn’t be in git source trees, since they should be generated and if you change something that requires a change in configure you can easily forget to do that.

Nevertheless it is still common to have configure scripts in git source repositories. I could give you tons of examples, but here’s just a popular one: https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/src/auto/configure