Patches submission policy change

Christophe Lyon via Gdb
2024-04-03T08:24:10Z

Dear release managers and developers,

TL;DR: For the sake of improving precommit CI coverage and simplifying
workflows, I’d like to request a patch submission policy change, so
that we now include regenerated files. This was discussed during the
last GNU toolchain office hours meeting [1] (2024-03-28).

Benefits or this change include:
- Increased compatibility with precommit CI
- No need to manually edit patches before submitting, thus the “git
send-email” workflow is simplified
- Patch reviewers can be confident that the committed patch will be
exactly what they approved
- Precommit CI can test exactly what has been submitted

Any concerns/objections?

As discussed on the lists and during the meeting, we have been facing
issues with testing a class of patches: those which imply regenerating
some files. Indeed, for binutils and gcc, the current patch submission
policy is to *not* include the regenerated files (IIUC the policy is
different for gdb [2]).

This means that precommit CI receives an incomplete patch, leading to
wrong and misleading regression reports, and complaints/frustration.
(our notifications now include a warning, making it clear that we do
not regenerate files ;-) )

I thought the solution was as easy as adding –enable-maintainer-mode
to the configure arguments but this has proven to be broken (random
failures with highly parallel builds). I tried to workaround that by
adding new “regenerate” rules in the makefiles, that we could build at
-j1 before running the real build with a higher parallelism level, but
this is not ideal, not to mention that in the case of gcc, configuring
target libraries requires having built all-gcc before, which is quite
slow at -j1.

Another approach used in binutils and gdb builtbots is a dedicated
script (aka autoregen.py) which calls autotools as appropriate. It
could be extended to update other types of files, but this can be a
bit tricky (eg. some opcodes files require to build a generator first,
some doc fragments also use non-trivial build sequences), and it
creates a maintenance issue: the build recipe is duplicated in the
script and in the makefiles. Such a script has proven to be useful
though in postcommit CI, to catch regeneration errors.

Having said that, it seems that for the sake of improving usefulness
of precommit CI, the simplest way forward is to change the policy to
include regenerated files. This does not seem to be a burden for
developers, since they have to regenerate the files before pushing
their patches anyway, and it also enables reviewers to make sure the
generated files are correct.

Said differently, if you want to increase the chances of having your
patches tested by precommit CI, make sure to include all the
regenerated files, otherwise you might receive failure notifications.

Any concerns/objections?

Thanks,

Christophe

[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/OfficeHours#Meeting:_2024-03-28_.40_1100h_EST5EDT
[2] https://inbox.sourceware.org/gdb/cc0a5c86-a041-429a-9890-efd3937606e5@simark.ca/