Re: Patches submission policy change

[Jonathan Wakely <jwakely.gcc@gmail.com>]

On Wed, 3 Apr 2024 at 09:46, Jakub Jelinek via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> 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.

For libstdc++ we've had two "large" changes to regenerated files in
the past year, but they're not common:
https://gcc.gnu.org/r14-5424-gdb50aea6259545
https://gcc.gnu.org/r14-5342-g898fd81b831c10

We were getting large, useless diffs for
libstdc++-v3/include/bits/version.h too (e.g.
r14-7220-gac1a399bf61b04) but I've fixed that now.

In ye olde days I used filterdiff to strip the generated files from
patch submissions, but with git send-email I no longer use filterdiff,
so as Christophe said, the suggested policy would avoid manually
editing emails before sending.

I don't feel strongly either way, but I have no objection to the change.