2.7 Issues with Version Control Systems

If a project stores its source files in a version control system (VCS), such as CVS, SVN, or Git, one needs to decide which files to commit.

All files created by gnulib-tool, except gnulib-cache.m4, should be treated like generated source files, like for example a parser.c file is generated from parser.y.

• In projects which commit all source files, whether generated or not, into their VCS, the gnulib-tool generated files should all be committed. In this case, you also pass the option ‘--no-vc-files’ to gnulib-tool.

  Gnulib also contains files generated by make (and removed by make clean), using information determined by configure. They should not be checked into the VCS, but instead added to .gitignore or .cvsignore. When you have a Gnulib source file of the form lib/foo.in.h, the corresponding lib/foo.h is such a file.

• In projects which customarily omit from their VCS all files that are generated from other source files, all these files and directories would not be added into the VCS. The only file that must be added to the VCS is gnulib-cache.m4 in the M4 macros directory. Also, the script for restoring files not in the VCS, customarily called autogen.sh or bootstrap.sh, will typically contain the statement for restoring the omitted files:

            $ gnulib-tool --update
  

  The ‘--update’ option operates much like the ‘--import’ option, but it does not offer the possibility to change the way Gnulib is used. Also it does not report in the ChangeLogs the files that it had to add because they were missing.