> First, I'm uncomfortable with making a package creator's VCS provider part of the language's module infrastructure.

Why can't you store a (possibly shallow) clone of the repository in the "package" registry?

> Second, not all files under version control necessarily belong in a tarball

How likely is it that files under version control but "not belonging in a tarball" (not needed to compile the current version) take so much space to justify making a tarball? At least if you make a shallow clone.

> not all files in a tarball necessarily need to be under version control

Which wouldn't (besides huge files that can be handled with git-lfs and similar)?

If you have configure in mind, let's not do it please.

The risks introduced by including them vastly overcome their convenience, in my opinion.

And maybe let's move towards getting rid of autotools

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cygx an hour ago | parent [-]

Why can't you store a (possibly shallow) clone of the repository in the "package" registry?

Yes, that would be an option.

As to your question, you generally want to version control input files, but distribute the generated artifacts. Some possible scenarios would be documentation, data tables in source or binary form, generated code including maybe even configure scripts if you cannot avoid it (though if I had to 'vendor' 3rdparty code that uses autotools, I think I probably would just unpack a tarball and commit the relevant artifacts).

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g-b-r 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

If you distribute generated artifacts you're not really distributing the source (and thus xz can happen)

Even for documentation, you'd think it would be harmless to generate it, but it's far from a given that the tools (e.g. browsers) used to read it are safe from malicious documentation files

	▲	cygx 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		it's far from a given that the tools (e.g. browsers) used to read it are safe from malicious documentation files Generated HTML files are potentially easier to audit than the scripts/toolchains used to generate them on an end user's machine if you do not pre-generate them. Off the top of my head, other things I've done is committing RELAX NG .rnc files, but shipping .rng files, or generating C header files for various types of data (think `xxd -i` in case of binary files, but also just large chunks of plain text that gets wrapped into a C string).