Another possible issue which may be better now than in years past
is that the versions of autoconf/automake required often had to be
installed by hand. I think newlib has gotten better but before the
rework on its Makefile/configure, I had a special install of autotools
which precisely matched what it required.

And that led to very few people being able to successfully regenerate.

Is that avoidable?

OTOH the set of people touching these files may be small enough that
pain isn't an issue.

--joel

On Wed, Apr 3, 2024 at 5:22 AM Jan Beulich via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:

> On 03.04.2024 10:57, Richard Biener wrote:
> > On Wed, 3 Apr 2024, Jan Beulich wrote:
> >> On 03.04.2024 10:45, Jakub Jelinek wrote:
> >>> On Wed, Apr 03, 2024 at 10:22:24AM +0200, Christophe Lyon wrote:
> >>>> Any concerns/objections?
> >>>
> >>> I'm all for it, in fact I've been sending it like that myself for years
> >>> even when the policy said not to.  In most cases, the diff for the
> >>> regenerated files is very small and it helps even in patch review to
> >>> actually check if the configure.ac/m4 etc. changes result just in the
> >>> expected changes and not some unrelated ones (e.g. caused by user using
> >>> wrong version of autoconf/automake etc.).
> >>> There can be exceptions, e.g. when in GCC we update from a new version
> >>> of Unicode, the regenerated ucnid.h diff can be large and
> >>> uname2c.h can be huge, such that it can trigger the mailing list size
> >>> limits even when the patch is compressed, see e.g.
> >>> https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2023-November/636427.html
> >>> https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2023-November/636426.html
> >>> But I think most configure or Makefile changes should be pretty small,
> >>> usual changes shouldn't rewrite everything in those files.
> >>
> >> Which may then call for a policy saying "include generate script diff-s,
> >> but don't include generated data file ones"? At least on the binutils
> >> side, dealing (for CI) with what e.g. opcodes/*-gen produce ought to be
> >> possible by having something along the lines of "maintainer mode light".
> >
> > I'd say we should send generated files when it fits the mailing list
> > limits (and possibly simply lift those limits?).
>
> Well, that would allow patches making it through, but it would still
> severely increase overall size. I'm afraid more people than not also
> fail to cut down reply context, so we'd further see (needlessly) huge
> replies to patches as well.
>
> Additionally - how does one up front determine "fits the mailing list
> limits"? My mail UI (Thunderbird) doesn't show me the size of a message
> until I've actually sent it.
>
> >  As a last resort
> > do a series splitting the re-generation out (but I guess this would
> > confuse the CI as well and of course for the push you want to squash
> > again).
>
> Yeah, unless the CI would only ever test full series, this wouldn't help.
> It's also imo even more cumbersome than simply stripping the generated
> file parts from emails.
>
> Jan
>