Help needed with maintainer-mode

[Sam James]

Mark Wielaard <mark@klomp.org> writes:

> Hi Christophe,

Hi Mark, Christophe, et. al,

>
> 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).

What we really need to do is, for a start, land tschwinge/aoliva's patches [0]
for AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS.

Right now, the current situation is janky and it's nowhere near
idiomatic autotools usage. It is not a comfortable experience
interacting with it even as someone who is familiar and happy with using
autotools otherwise.

I didn't yet play with maintainer-mode myself but I also didn't see much
point given I knew of more fundamental problems like this.

[0] https://inbox.sourceware.org/gcc-patches/oril72c4yh.fsf@lxoliva.fsfla.org/

>
> Cheers,
>
> Mark

best,
sam
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