[PATCH v1 1/1] bfd: add a mean to programatically detect a release version

[Sam James]

Matthieu Longo <matthieu.longo@arm.com> writes:

> On 2025-08-21 17:00, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> On 14.08.2025 17:16, Matthieu Longo wrote:
>>> In a recent discussion around Object Attributes v2, it appeared that we
>>> needed a way to detect whether a tool was built as a release version,
>>> or development version.
>>>
>>> A previous patch (7b40f4c6587c) introduced this detection in gas.
>>> This patch reuses the same principle but moved the code into a utility
>>> function in bsd, so that gas, ld, and others can rely on it. It also
>>> adds a Tcl function 'is_release' that can be used with a '#target: '
>>> directive to disable some tests relying on development-only features.
>> The C side is pretty much okay with me, but ...
>> 
>>> --- a/binutils/testsuite/lib/binutils-common.exp
>>> +++ b/binutils/testsuite/lib/binutils-common.exp
>>> @@ -17,6 +17,19 @@
>>>   # Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street - Fifth Floor, Boston,
>>>   # MA 02110-1301, USA.
>>>   +# True if the current tool is a release version.
>>> +#
>>> +proc is_release {} {
>>> +  global AS
>>> +  catch "exec $AS --version | head -1" exec_output
>> ... already here implementation and comment ("current tool") don't
>> match.
>> For some targets gas isn't even being built. If you only need this for
>> gas, maybe limit it to just that?
>> 
>
> This test is used in both ld and gas tests. The code that has a
> different behavior at runtime is located in bfd, and is used by both
> gas and ld.
>
> If ld is built for all targets, I can replace $AS by $LD. Or might ld
> not be present in some cases ?
>
> Indeed "current tool" is ambiguous. I meant the current tool under
> test, so gas in the case of gas tests, and gas+ld in the case of the
> linker tests. What about the below ?
>   # True if the binutils tools under test were built in release mode.
>>> +  if [regexp {\d+\.\d+\.\d+(\.\d+)} $exec_output matched sub1] then {
>> I have no idea whether this may get in conflict with some distro's
>> versioning.
>> Jan
>
> How could the pattern be changed to remove this risk ? Since I don't
> have BFD_VERSION_DATE like in bfd_is_release_version(), I don't see
> anything obvious. Any suggestion ?
>
> FYI, in the specific case I would like to use it (see your comment on
> OAv2 patch series), if the distribution were to use a conflicting
> version scheme, it would at worst cause some tests to be executed
> whereas they should be skipped, and thus they would appear as test
> failures. Do the distributions execute the binutils tests every time
> they generate a new artifact ?

If a distribution runs testsuites, it generally does it on every
build.

sam