Re: [PATCH 1/2] Bump to autoconf 2.69 and automake 1.15.1

Joseph Myers
2018-06-15T17:29:24Z

Questions:

* Are all the shared files and directories fully in sync between the GCC
and binutils-gdb trees before this patch? Shared directories include
config, intl, parts of include, libdecnumber, libiberty, zlib, for
example.

* Where you are changing shared files and directories, do any changes to
*non-generated* files other than config/override.m4 depend on the autoconf
/ automake updates, or would such changes work equally well in the GCC
tree even in the absence of a version update there?

If proposing to change only one tree at a time I think it's important to
take care to minimise the extra costs introduced for people synchronizing
changes between the two trees while the versions are out of sync. To me,
that indicates that the shared files and directories should be fully in
sync before any changes making them deliberately out of sync are applied,
and that changes to non-generated files other than config/override.m4
should go in both places if they work in both places, so that the
differences immediately after the change is applied are only the required
ones (i.e. config/override.m4 and the generated files), so that anyone
then merging a subsequent change in future knows they expect to get back
to exactly that set of differences and no more.

(Shared files in the newlib-cygwin tree have been out of sync for a lot
longer. So, while I think that tree also ought to have shared files in
sync, with changes being applied to all three trees (I don't know if
newlib-cygwin has any changes not present in the other trees), I don't
think it's immediately relevant to changes in the binutils-gdb tree right
now.)

--
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com