targets to handle gnu dist procedures?

[karl at freefriends dot org (Karl Berry)]

John Darrington (cc'd here), who maintains the GNUbik package, made this
suggestion:

> With the new ftp upload procedures, shouldn't the automake targets be
> changed appropriately?  In particular:
>
> The dist target should generate the package.tar.gz.asc file and the
> dist-check target should verify that this signature is indeed valid.

I myself don't think it should be part of dist and distcheck.  Doing the
signature requires typing the pass phrase.  It often takes a dozen runs
of dist[check] before the release is actually ready (at least for me).
I would be quite annoyed at having to do the signature stuff on every
test run.

Having a separate target to do it, however, could be useful.  Maybe even
make the directive file and sign it, too, with a variable that defaults
to $PACKAGE for the directory name.  (Some variables would also be
necessary for the gpg invocations, of course.)

What do you think?

Best,
karl