Hi! Sorry for cross-posting, but I'm not sure the rules/guidelines are the same in gcc vs binutils/gdb.
TL;DR: are there some guidelines about how to use/enable maintainer-mode? In the context of the Linaro CI, I've been looking at enabling maintainer-mode at configure time in our configurations where we test patches before they are committed (aka "precommit CI", which relies on patchwork). Indeed, auto-generated files are not part of patch submissions, and when a patch implies regenerating some files before building, we currently report wrong failures because we don't perform such updates. I hoped improving this would be as simple as adding --enable-maintainer-mode when configuring, after making sure autoconf-2.69 and automake-1.15.1 were in the PATH (using our host's libtool and gettext seems OK). However, doing so triggered several problems, which look like race conditions in the build system (we build at -j160): - random build errors in binutils / gdb with messages like "No rule to make target 'po/BLD-POTFILES.in". I managed to reproduce something similar manually once, I noticed an empty Makefile; the build logs are of course difficult to read, so I couldn't figure out yet what could cause this. - random build failures in gcc in fixincludes. I think this is a race condition because fixincludes is updated concurrently both from /fixincludes and $buillddir/fixincludes. Probably fixable in gcc Makefiles. - I've seen other errors when building gcc like configure.ac:25: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_ENABLE_MULTILIB from libquadmath. I haven't investigated this yet. I've read binutils' README-maintainer-mode, which contains a warning about distclean, but we don't use this: we start our builds from a scratch directory. So... I'm wondering if there are some "official" guidelines about how to regenerate files, and/or use maintainer-mode? Maybe I missed a "magic" make target (eg 'make autoreconf-all') that should be executed after configure and before 'make all'? I've noticed that sourceware's buildbot has a small script "autoregen.py" which does not use the project's build system, but rather calls aclocal/autoheader/automake/autoconf in an ad-hoc way. Should we replicate that? Thanks, Christophe
