2.3 Files

siliconBrain projects can have three kinds of files:

2.3.1 self written files

These are the files you edit and which should go into cvs. These are the sources of your project. They are all collected in the root directory of the project.

2.3.2 templated files

These are generated by siliconBrain, if and only if they are not existing. For example for the first initialization of a project. Or when a new version of siliconBrain includes additional templated files. Templated files can be edited, changed. They should be registered in cvs. They are like self written files and so they are part of the source of your project. But you never should delete them, because other parts of siliconBrain generated features rely on their existens.

2.3.3 target files

Like your executables, html and info docs. They are placed in:

data

Data needed to run the program. But only static data.

documentation

All kinds of documents.

programs

contains all programs. This could be bash or awk scripts, emacs lisp files, binaries and libraries.

2.3.4 temporary files

Like *.o. These files are only needed during the make process and are not installed with install.

2.3.5 capital files

Capital files are COPYING, COPYING.DOC, AUTHORS, INSTALL, INTRODUCTION, NEWS, README, TODO. These files are generated out of templated texinfo snippets. You can edit these snippets, but never change the capital files by them self. Because the snippets are templated, you have a good idea of its structure.

Capital files are so important for understanding of a distribution of your project, so that they are not put in between the target files. But they are targets. They are so important to find, so they are capitalized in their names, so they are sorted at the beginning of a normal ls.

These files are those you find in other non siliconBrain open source packages as well. These are those files, which are required or created by automake (although we don't use automake).

These files should be registered in cvs, so that, when someone checks out a siliconBrain project, she can immediately read these files, without building the project, or without detecting the underlying texinfo snippets.

So these files are like sources, as they are in cvs and in the projects root directory. They are like targets, as they are generated by make and are never edited.

To say it again: all changes you have made in a capital file, will vanish during the next make. Edit the underlying snippets instead: readme.snippet.texinfo for README.

COPYING and COPYING.DOC are special in that they are not generated out of snippets, which lie in your projects directory. Instead they are copied from files in siliconBrain. The idea behind is, that you should not edit these files, as they reflect the current versions of GNU's gpl and fdl.

2.3.6 the RELEASE file

This file just contains the release number. For example 0.1.42. This file should be registered in cvs.

This file is used by make public, which increases the last number and automatically creates a cvs tag for this. If you like to increase the first or second number, you have to edit this file.