On Thu, 29 Feb 2024 at 11:41, Richard Earnshaw (lists) <richard.earns...@arm.com> wrote: > > On 29/02/2024 10:22, Christophe Lyon via Gcc wrote: > > Hi! > > > > Sorry for cross-posting, but I'm not sure the rules/guidelines are the > > same in gcc vs binutils/gdb. > > > > TL;DR: are there some guidelines about how to use/enable maintainer-mode? > > > > In the context of the Linaro CI, I've been looking at enabling > > maintainer-mode at configure time in our configurations where we test > > patches before they are committed (aka "precommit CI", which relies on > > patchwork). > > > > Indeed, auto-generated files are not part of patch submissions, and > > when a patch implies regenerating some files before building, we > > currently report wrong failures because we don't perform such updates. > > > > I hoped improving this would be as simple as adding > > --enable-maintainer-mode when configuring, after making sure > > autoconf-2.69 and automake-1.15.1 were in the PATH (using our host's > > libtool and gettext seems OK). > > > > However, doing so triggered several problems, which look like race > > conditions in the build system (we build at -j160): > > - random build errors in binutils / gdb with messages like "No rule to > > make target 'po/BLD-POTFILES.in". I managed to reproduce something > > similar manually once, I noticed an empty Makefile; the build logs are > > of course difficult to read, so I couldn't figure out yet what could > > cause this. > > > > - random build failures in gcc in fixincludes. I think this is a race > > condition because fixincludes is updated concurrently both from > > /fixincludes and $buillddir/fixincludes. Probably fixable in gcc > > Makefiles. > > > > - I've seen other errors when building gcc like > > configure.ac:25: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_ENABLE_MULTILIB > > from libquadmath. I haven't investigated this yet. > > > > I've read binutils' README-maintainer-mode, which contains a warning > > about distclean, but we don't use this: we start our builds from a > > scratch directory. > > > > So... I'm wondering if there are some "official" guidelines about how > > to regenerate files, and/or use maintainer-mode? Maybe I missed a > > "magic" make target (eg 'make autoreconf-all') that should be executed > > after configure and before 'make all'? > > > > I've noticed that sourceware's buildbot has a small script > > "autoregen.py" which does not use the project's build system, but > > rather calls aclocal/autoheader/automake/autoconf in an ad-hoc way. > > Should we replicate that? > > > > Thanks, > > > > Christophe > > There are other potential gotchas as well, such as the manual copying of the > generated tm.texi back into the source repo due to relicensing. Perhaps we > haven't encountered that one because patches generally contain that > duplicated output. > It did happen a few weeks ago, with a patch that was updating the target hooks IIRC.
> If we want a CI to work reliably, then perhaps we should reconsider our > policy of stripping out regenerated code. We have a number of developer > practices, such as replying to an existing patch with an updated version that > the CI can't handle easily (especially if the patch is part of a series), so > there may be space for a discussion on how to work smarter. > Sure, there are many things we can improve in the current workflow to make it more CI friendly ;-) But I was only asking how maintainer-mode is supposed to be used, so that I can replicate the process in CI. I couldn't find any documentation :-) Thanks, Christophe > My calendar says we have a toolchain office hours meeting today, perhaps this > would be worth bringing up. > > R. >
