Re: Help needed with maintainer-mode

[Mark Wielaard <mark@klomp.org>]

Hi Christophe,

On Fri, Mar 01, 2024 at 05:32:15PM +0100, Christophe Lyon wrote:
> > > > And it was indeed done this way because that way the files are
> > > > regenerated in a reproducible way. Which wasn't the case when using --enable-maintainer-mode (and autoreconfig also doesn't work).
> > >
> > > I see. So it is possibly incomplete, in the sense that it may lack
> > > some of the steps that maintainer-mode would perform?
> > > For instance, gas for aarch64 has some *opcodes*.c files that need
> > > regenerating before committing. The regeneration step is enabled in
> > > maintainer-mode, so I guess the autoregen bots on Sourceware would
> > > miss a problem with these files?
> >
> > Yes, it is certainly incomplete. But it is done this way because it is
> > my understanding that even the gcc release maintainers do the
> > automake/autoconf invocations by hand instead of running with configure
> > --enable-maintainer-mode.
> 
> After a discussion on IRC, I read
> https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Regenerating_GCC_Configuration
> which basically says "run autoreconf in every dir where there is a
> configure script"
> but this is not exactly what autoregen.py is doing. IIRC it is based
> on a script from Martin Liska, do you know/remember why it follows a
> different process?

CCing Sam and Arsen who helped refine the autoregen.py script, who
might remember more details. We wanted a script that worked for both
gcc and binutils-gdb. And as far as I know autoreconf simply didn't
work in all directories. We also needed to skip some directories that
did contain a configure script, but that were imported (gotools,
readline, minizip).

Cheers,

Mark