Re: [PATCH v4 0/5] meson: add corresponding target for Makefile's hdr-check

> Karthik Nayak <karthik.188@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Step #1, clones the repository, since the `git` executable isn't present
>> at this step, it uses GitHub's REST API to obtain a tar of the
>> repository.
>>
>> Step #2, installs all dependencies, which includes the `git` executable.
>>
>> Step #3, sets up the build, which includes setting up meson in the meson
>> job. At this point the `git` executable is present, so within meson
>> `git.found()` would be true. As such we run 'git ls-files' as part of my
>> patch series, but since the repository doesn't contain the `.git`
>> folder, the command fails.
>>
>> So like Phillip mentioned, we need to ensure that the `git` executable
>> is present before step #1.
>>
>> I hope that makes sense.
>
> Please roll that into the appropriate commit log message for the fix
> you'd send out, so the next person who wonders why this topic broke
> the CI does not have to ask the same question.
>

> Our sources are
> meant to be buildable from either release tarballs (which is created
> by "make dist") or a repository (with .git), but from the analysis
> of Phillip and you, it sounds like the CI environment has been
> building and testing from a "git archive HEAD" output extracted as a
> tarball, which is *not* something any real users build from.  Making
> sure that building from release tarballs works is a good thing to
> ensure in CI, because all our developers are testing in their own
> repository (with .git) so we wouldn't easily notice ourselves if we
> broke the build procedure in such a way that it would somehow
> require say "git describe" or "git ls-files" to work.
>