Re: [OE-core] [PATCH] binutils: Pregenerate autoconf files

["Khem Raj" <raj.khem@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 10:03 AM Khem Raj <raj.khem@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 5:45 AM Richard Purdie
> <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 2020-03-25 at 16:16 -0700, Khem Raj wrote:
> > > libtool patch will result in configure file regeneration, instead of
> > > doing that at build time, do it in patch itself, this avoids running
> > > autoconf before configure step.
> > >
> > > Since binutils needs specific version of autoconf ( which is 2.69 )
> > > this will break on systems using newer or older verisons of autoconf
> > > in current state.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Khem Raj <raj.khem@gmail.com>
> > > Cc: Ross Burton <ross.burton@intel.com>
> > > ---
> > >  meta/recipes-devtools/binutils/binutils.inc   |     8 +-
> > >  .../binutils/0007-Use-libtool-2.4.patch       | 26583 ++++++++++++
> > > ----
> > >  2 files changed, 20352 insertions(+), 6239 deletions(-)
> >
> > Whilst I appreciate the intent here, our policy is to autoreconf most
> > things in general. This allows us to more easily support newer
> > architectures and platforms.
> >
> > There is a significant build speed benefit from not autoreconf'ing
> > things but where do we draw the line?
> >
>
> in general this is fine but binutils, gcc , glibc can not be treated
> in general category
> since they have dependencies on specific versions of autotools
> unfortunately, it currently
> works for binutils because our version of autoconf matches with what
> binutils expects
> as of now, but this will skew if this changes in future. In nutshell,
> the auto-fu in these
> packages is quite involved and has hard dependencies on specific
> versions of tools
> needed to reconfig them.
>
> > I'm also worried about patches which touch both configure and
> > configure.ac since the timestamp changes can cause things to autoreconf
> > even when we're trying to avoid that. As such this is actually quite a
> > risky change given past bad experiences :(
>
> We were not fully reconfiguring binutils even now, because of other
> autotool sversion mimatches
> only autoconf was being run which does not change the case if
> configure was say regenerated
> as you say.
>
> >
> > I'm not completely against it but I am worried.
> >
>
> perhaps addresses some of your concerns.

after some IRC discussions, I think it better for us to drop this change.

>
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Richard
> >