A GNU Binutils wiki

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Nick,

On Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 11:03:12AM +0000, Nick Clifton via Binutils wrote:
> > How are the current code snapshots created?
> 
> I think that there is a cron job on sourceware that creates the snapshots.

I can find the gdbadmin cron job that creates gdb snapshots, but it
looks like you create the binutils snapshots by hand and upload them
to https://sourceware.org/pub/binutils/snapshots/

It would be nice to automate this a bit more either with a real
cronjob or a specific buildbot worker.

> > How is the documentation uploaded at release time?
> 
> By hand. :-)
> 
> I have a procedure outlined in the binutils/README-how-to-make-a-release
> document that I follow whenever I need to update the documentation.

Nice. I saw you just updated for the next release.  We can automate
some steps of that. Specifically 9. Create an initial
pre-release. Which can be a build script for the buildbot that can
create a snapshot each commit or day.

About

  12. Build various different toolchains, test them and nag
      maintainers to fix any testsuite failures for their
      architectures...

Which toolchains/architectures are that? Are any of them missing from:
https://builder.sourceware.org/buildbot/#/builders?tags=binutils

BTW. binutils-debian-i386, binutils-fedora-arm64 and
binutils-fedora-s390x do show some testsuite failures.

> > We can automate both and publish them on a special buildbot worker
> > under something like snapshots.sourceware.org/bintuils to keep them
> > current and so everybody can immediately see how the documentation
> > looks.
> 
> That would be nice.  Would it involve taking up a lot of disk space ?
> (Ie for how long would these snapshots last ?)

binutils snapshots are ~24MB, documentation ~18MB. So if we do one a
day that is ~1GB a month. And since it looks like you recently added
the option to create reproducible tarballs we don't really need to
keep all of them since people could recreate them from a git checkout.

Cheers,

Mark