Autotools: should config.guess, depcomp or ltmain.sh be stored in the SVN repo?

Question

I am taking over a project and I see in the subversion repository some files that belong to the distribution of libtool and automake such as config.guess, depcomp or ltmain.sh. I believe this is simply wrong because when I do the check out, I should have the autotools installed on my machine and do an autoreconf.

What do you think ? Am I missing the point of having these files in the repository ?

Answer 1

Typically, you wouldn't have those in your SVN repo. Usually you have an autogen.sh that recreates it on demand. Your instinct to not store potentially-stale files is a good one. If somebody commits a change to configure.ac, and somebody else checks out the whole thing with the configure, the change won't matter.

Answer 2

Almost anything that can be generated - and depcomp, etc. belong to that - should not be part of a tracked source repository.