RE: should any build system legitimately change any tracked files?

["Randall S. Becker" <rsbecker@nexbridge.com>]

On January 19, 2018 12:52 PM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>   just finished teaching a couple git courses and, after class, a student
came
> up and described a rather weird problem -- in short:
> 
>   1) before build, "git diff" shows nothing
>   2) do the standard build
>   3) suddenly, "git diff" shows some changes
> 
> that's all the info i was given, but it *seems* clear that the build
process itself
> was making changes to one or more tracked files.
> 
>   technically, i guess one can design a build system to do pretty much
> anything, but is it fair to say that this is a really poor design
decision?
> admittedly, this isn't specifically a git question, but i'm open to
opinions on
> something that strikes me as a bad idea.

Depends what you're up to.  Changing the source repository content is
probably bad. Adding tags may not be. Also, updating a separate repository
to include build information (a.k.a dependency tracking between source and
object commits) can be very useful for managing production builds and
environments.

Cheers,
Randall

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