Re: How do I create a GCC source code tarball?

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden@schemamania.org>]

On Tue, 4 Oct 2022 12:03:12 -0700
Andrew Pinski via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:

> >       Building a full distribution of this tree isn't done
> >       via 'make dist'.  Check out the etc/ subdirectory
...
> You just tar up the source.
> You could use maintainer-scripts/gcc_release to make a snapshot but in
> the end it just does `tar xcfj file.tar.bz2 gcc` .

If I may, the error message would be improved by making it shorter: 

>       Building a full distribution of this tree isn't done
>       via 'make dist'.

since that at least would be accurate!  But why not just make it work
again? Change the dist target in Makefile.in: 

	dist:
		tar xcfj file.tar.bz2 gcc
or
	dist:
		$(srcdir)/maintainer-scripts/gcc_release $(RELEASE_OPTS)

where RELEASE_OPTS has some simple default.   The user wishing to know
more can inspect the script to determine what options to use. 

I spent several hours looking for information on how to do this.  I
wasn't counting on a decade of misdirection.  It's not mentioned
anywhere that I could find in the source tree or the wiki.  I missed
maintainer-scripts among the 75 files because it wasn't in upper case,
where I expect to find developer information. If the process of
generating nightly tarballs is documented, I missed that, too. 

I'm happy to open a PR or submit a patch.

--jkl