Help needed with maintainer-mode

[Richard Earnshaw]

On 05/03/2024 14:26, Richard Earnshaw (lists) wrote:
> On 04/03/2024 20:04, Jonathan Wakely wrote:
>> On Mon, 4 Mar 2024 at 19:27, Vladimir Mezentsev
>> <vladimir.mezentsev@oracle.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 3/4/24 09:38, Richard Earnshaw (lists) wrote:
>>>> Tools like git (and svn before it) don't try to maintain time-stamps on patches, the tool just modifies the file and the timestamp comes from the time of the modification.  That's fine if there is nothing regenerated within the repository (it's pure original source), but will cause problems if there are generated files as their time stamps aren't necessarily correct.  `gcc_update --touch` addresses that by ensuring all the generated files are retouched when needed.
>>>
>>> Why do we save generated files in the source tree?
>>> What will be the problem if we remove Makefile.in and configure from
>>> source tree and will run `autoreconf -i -f` before building ?
>> 
>> Having the exact correct versions of autoconf and automake increases
>> the barrier for new contributors to start work. And to regenerate
>> everything, they also need autogen, mkinfo, etc.
> 
> It's worse than that.  They might need multiple versions of those tools because different subtrees are built with different, subtly incompatible, versions of those tools.
> 
> R.
> 

And I've just remembered another reason as well, which is that some people want to store their sources in a read-only environment; having the tools write to the source area during a build can cause problems (eg if building multiple configurations of the compiler in parallel).

R.