Re: Patches submission policy change

Richard Biener via Gdb
2024-04-03T08:58:58Z

On Wed, 3 Apr 2024, Jan Beulich wrote:

> On 03.04.2024 10:45, Jakub Jelinek wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 03, 2024 at 10:22:24AM +0200, Christophe Lyon wrote:
> >> Any concerns/objections?
> >
> > I'm all for it, in fact I've been sending it like that myself for years
> > even when the policy said not to. In most cases, the diff for the
> > regenerated files is very small and it helps even in patch review to
> > actually check if the configure.ac/m4 etc. changes result just in the
> > expected changes and not some unrelated ones (e.g. caused by user using
> > wrong version of autoconf/automake etc.).
> > There can be exceptions, e.g. when in GCC we update from a new version
> > of Unicode, the regenerated ucnid.h diff can be large and
> > uname2c.h can be huge, such that it can trigger the mailing list size
> > limits even when the patch is compressed, see e.g.
> > https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2023-November/636427.html
> > https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2023-November/636426.html
> > But I think most configure or Makefile changes should be pretty small,
> > usual changes shouldn't rewrite everything in those files.
>
> Which may then call for a policy saying "include generate script diff-s,
> but don't include generated data file ones"? At least on the binutils
> side, dealing (for CI) with what e.g. opcodes/*-gen produce ought to be
> possible by having something along the lines of "maintainer mode light".

I'd say we should send generated files when it fits the mailing list
limits (and possibly simply lift those limits?). As a last resort
do a series splitting the re-generation out (but I guess this would
confuse the CI as well and of course for the push you want to squash
again).

Richard.

> Jan
>