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

[Richard Biener <richard.guenther@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Oct 8, 2022 at 12:54 AM James K. Lowden
<jklowden@schemamania.org> wrote:
>
> 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:

Note that etc/ is present in the src tree (from binutils/gdb), the complication
here is that the toplevel Makefile is shared between gcc and binutils/gdb
so we can't simply invoke something from maintainer-scripts which isn't
present on the binutils/gdb side ...

>         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.

There is https://gcc.gnu.org/releasing.html and assorted pages where
such stuff is documented.  There's probably something similar on
the binutils/gdb side.

I guess the best thing we can do is improve the wording of the
'make dist' diagnostic plus eventually have parts of it documented
in sourcebuild.texi

Richard.

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