Exclude files from ninja dist? Not in a git repo

[paugier]

This is more a feature request than a bug but I didn't find where to add a feature request.

Related to #3081 but here explicitly without Git.

I understood that in a Git repository one can use export-ignore in .gitattributes to exclude files from a dist. But of course, it does not work when we are not in a Git repository. The .gitattributes trick seems like a vcs specific workaround and not something robust.

Is there already another method? Could this be supported?

[eli-schwartz]

You can add arbitrary dist scripts which rm a file(s) from the dist root in addition to creating new ones or modify existing ones.

Export-subst is a useful optimization but not a requirement -- it came long after dist scripts were added.

[paugier]

For the record, https://mesonbuild.com/Reference-manual_builtin_meson.html#mesonadd_dist_script explains how to use dist scripts. And this feature is not mentioned in https://mesonbuild.com/Creating-releases.html

[eli-schwartz]

That does seem like a bad hole in the documentation, and I would be very happy to merge patches that improved the documentation here. :)

[rgommers]

gh-12837 attempts to improve the docs to address this issue.