[Buildroot] Patchwork cleanup week #24

[Vlad Zakharov]

Hello, 

On Wed, 2016-06-22 at 05:45 +0000, Alexey Brodkin wrote:
> Hi Romain,
> 
> On Sat, 2016-06-18 at 16:07 +0200, Romain Naour wrote:
> > 
> > Hi Thomas, Alexey, Vlad, All,
> > 
> > Le 15/06/2016 à 22:06, Thomas Petazzoni a écrit :
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Hello,
> > > 
> > > The previous patchwork cleanup period being over, it's time to start
> > > the second period, with 10 other patches. We're on June 15th, so I'll
> > > give people until June 30th to react on the following patches. If
> > > there's no reaction, like no interest from either the original
> > > submitter nor any other Buildroot developer, the patch will be marked
> > > Rejected on June 30th.
> > > 
> > > If you are in To: of this e-mail, then one or several of the patches
> > > below have been authored by you, so you should be interested :-)
> > > 
> > > Thanks,
> > > 
> > > Thomas
> > > 
> > >  5. Fix for the makeinfo / missing issue, proposal from Romain
> > >     http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/595041/
> > >     http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/595042/
> > >     http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/595043/
> > > 
> > >     We need to take a decision on this one. The problem also occurs for
> > >     gdb and binutils on ARC, for which we've added a custom hack
> > >     recently.
> > > 
> > >     I tried to play with timestamps by touch'ing the .info files before
> > >     the build, it worked with one of gdb or binutils, but failed for
> > >     the other.
> > > 
> > >     So either we take Romain's approach, or we bite the bullet and add
> > >     a host-makeinfo package on which we depend when gdb/binutils are
> > >     fetched from Git.
> > > 
> > IHMO the real problem is that binutils/gdb doesn't support --disable-docs
> > option. When present on the command line, this option must completely disable
> > the documentation (man, info, pdf etc) and let the build continue.
> > 
> > It seems that this issue was already discussed back in 2007 [1].
> > Last year I submitted a patch upstream to do that but it was not complete and
> > not tested due to autoconf version mismatch [2].
> > 
> > If we want to autoreconf binutils/gdb in Buildroot we must downgrade autoconf to
> > 2.64 and automake to 1.12.6.
> > 
> > Alexey, Vlad, I would suggest to rework your patch [3] and add --disable-docs
> > option instead of testing missing 127 return value.
> > If you succeed, we can reject my proposal from patchwork :)
> Right, that's what we're looking at now.
> Stay tuned and patch(es) will follow :)
> 
> -Alexey

I looked around adding --disable-docs option and faced some difficulties.
Configuration process is rather difficult in binutils.
 * "configure" scripts are generated for each package from corresponding template file.
 * "configure" script is generated from "configure.ac", 
 * "configure" script generates Makefiles from "Makefile.in" files, also it runs "configure" scripts in sub-directories, etc.
 * Build is recursive. 
 * Doc targets for some packages are added to separate directory, for other the are not.

Also I don't have required versions of autoconf (v. 2.64) and automake (v.1.11.6).
It is required to use particular versions to avoid introducing subtle bugs in configure and/or Makefile.in.
For example:
https://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2013-04/msg00210.html

So implementing this option doesn't seem to be a low-hanging fruit after all.

Returning to the problem. Real issue is that build fails when "makeinfo" is missing on build host.
So a nice and much easier idea is to add "makeinfo" package and make binutils and gdb dependent on the "host-makeinfo" package.

-- 
Best regards,
Vlad Zakharov <vzakhar at synopsys.com>