Following up on this thread from the archived mailing list, I have opened a PR to work on this which is currently a work-in-progress.
This change would only impact users that clone the Asterisk source code directly from the git repository. Users who build from release tarballs would not be impacted as the tarballs would contain the generated autoconf scripts.
Before this got too much further down the read I wanted to solicit feedback from you all - especially those who package Asterisk. Does this make your life measurably more difficult and, if so, what can we do about it? If the answer is “Keep configure in the repository!” that is also valuable feedback.
I like the definition of “source code” from the GPL:
The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
To me, this means the parts that the human developers want to work on, not anything that is automatically generated from that. A configure script that is automatically generated obviously doesn’t count as that. And the source tarball itself is also automatically generated, is it not?
Therefore, the VCS should only contain “source code”, as per the above definition. Putting anything else in there just complicates the job of keeping the commit history up to date.
Are users doing that? Seems like they’d be at least the developers subclass of users at that point… and if this change makes it easier to spot (subtle) errors while doing development in different branches, that could be nice.
Perhaps pedantic, but Asterisk is distributed under the GPL version 2 – not version 3 as you linked – however, the definition is the same, and the downstream points in support of this change are valid and consistent.
That has nothing to do with why I referenced the definition from that licence. It’s something that I think should apply to any software project anyway.
