Let's remove all (or the largest) diffs from gcc-cvs@

Let's remove all (or the largest) diffs from gcc-cvs@

[Hans-Peter Nilsson]

TL;DR: See subject.  Verbosity follows.

The git transition is mostly for the better.  Thanks to those
investing time and effort.  There's always fallout.  Here's one
dustcloud:

In the distant past with svn, there messages to gcc-cvs@ were
somewhat like git show --stat, i.e. without the actual changes:

------------------------>
Author: gccadmin
Date: Wed Dec 25 00:16:22 2019
New Revision: 279730

URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/viewcvs?rev=279730&root=gcc&view=rev
Log:
Daily bump.

Modified:
    trunk/gcc/DATESTAMP
------------------------<

Now after the git transition, patches *always* come with a diff, as below.

------------------------>
https://gcc.gnu.org/g:d8998708ca316249e475d139c89ae7d169e64d34

commit d8998708ca316249e475d139c89ae7d169e64d34
Author: GCC Administrator <gccadmin@gcc.gnu.org>
Date:   Wed Jan 15 00:16:26 2020 +0000

    Daily bump.

Diff:
---
 gcc/DATESTAMP | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/gcc/DATESTAMP b/gcc/DATESTAMP
index 3a0695d..ba948c5 100644
--- a/gcc/DATESTAMP
+++ b/gcc/DATESTAMP
@@ -1 +1 @@
-20200114
+20200115
------------------------<

(No, not just the daily bump, I just wanted to avoid a person
being pointed out and had no commits myself "within reach".)

Why the diff?  I don't remember the absence of a diff being a
problem in the svn era (or at least wasn't argued much on the
mailing lists).

Compare also to traffic on binutils-cvs@ and gdb-cvs@, where
there *are* diffs posted, but apparently there's a size limit; I
see "[diff truncated at 100000 bytes]" for a post on gdb-cvs.
Still, I very much prefer no diff at all.

Does someone actually (not theoretically) have a need that is
fulfilled by those diffs?

Can we remove them altogether?
If not, can we cap the messages at a size limit?

Note: I'm aware of the discussion regarding limiting posts for
certain branches to gcc-cvs; that's incidental.  Note also that
my own needs are handled by means of procmail, I was just
bothered enough to bring it up, and less email traffic on
sourceware means more bandwidth for actual commit traffic. :)

brgds, H-P

Re: Let's remove all (or the largest) diffs from gcc-cvs@

[Joseph Myers]

On Sat, 18 Jan 2020, Hans-Peter Nilsson wrote:

> Why the diff?  I don't remember the absence of a diff being a
> problem in the svn era (or at least wasn't argued much on the
> mailing lists).

I think the diffs are nice to have there (as for binutils-gdb and glibc) 
for following the development on gcc-cvs.

> Can we remove them altogether?

The hooks have an option hooks.disable-email-diff to stop sending diffs, 
but it looks like it disables the diffstat as well so then the emails 
wouldn't include the list of changed files either.

> If not, can we cap the messages at a size limit?

They are capped.  hooks.max-email-diff-size is currently set to 524288 
(I'm not sure what the exact message size limit is on the gcc-cvs mailing 
list, but emails larger than that were quite common for some branch merges 
in the SVN era because of very long lists of files changed).

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com