Should I include configure and makefile in a github repository?
autoconf, automake, github, software-distribution
Solution
The second is better: you want any user of your repo to be up and running as fast as possible, re-generating what he/she needs in order to build your program.
Since Git is very much a version control for text (as opposed to an artifact repo like Nexus), providing a way to generate the final binary is the way to go.
Problem
We recently moved from subversion to git, and then to Github, for several open source projects. Github was nice in that it provided a lot of functionality. One of the things I particularly like is the ability to download tags as `zip` or `.tar.gz` files. Unfortunately Github recently discontinued downloads. That shouldn't be a problem because of the ability to download tags. However in the past we have not put a `Makefile` , `configure` script or any other autoconf-generated files into the repo because they get lots of conflicts when people merge. What's the proper way to handle this? - Should I put autoconf and automake-generated files in the repo so people can download tags directly? - Or should there be a `bootstrap.sh` file and people are told to run that? - Or should I just do a `make dist` and put that into the repo? Thanks