Item 4: Ensuring Your Distribution Packages Are Clean
Have you ever downloaded and unpacked an open source package, and tried to run configure && make only to have it fail half way through one of these steps? As you dug into the problem, perhaps you discovered missing files in the tarball. How sad to have this happen in an Autotools project, when the Autotools make it so easy to ensure that this simply doesn't happen.
To ensure that your distribution tarballs are always clean and complete, run the distcheck target on a newly created tarball. Don't be satisfied with what you believe about your package. Allow Automake to run the distribution unit tests. I call these tests unit tests because they provide the same testing functionality for a distribution ...
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