]> git.saurik.com Git - bison.git/blob - README-hacking
style: remove useless C++ provisio
[bison.git] / README-hacking
1 This file attempts to describe the rules to use when hacking Bison.
2 Don't put this file into the distribution.
3
4 Everything related to the development of Bison is on Savannah:
5
6 http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/bison/
7
8
9 * Administrivia
10
11 ** If you incorporate a change from somebody on the net:
12 First, if it is a large change, you must make sure they have signed
13 the appropriate paperwork. Second, be sure to add their name and
14 email address to THANKS.
15
16 ** If a change fixes a test, mention the test in the commit message.
17
18 ** Bug reports
19 If somebody reports a new bug, mention his name in the commit message
20 and in the test case you write. Put him into THANKS.
21
22 The correct response to most actual bugs is to write a new test case
23 which demonstrates the bug. Then fix the bug, re-run the test suite,
24 and check everything in.
25
26
27 * Hacking
28
29 ** Visible changes
30 Which include serious bug fixes, must be mentioned in NEWS.
31
32 ** Translations
33 Only user visible strings are to be translated: error messages, bits
34 of the .output file etc. This excludes impossible error messages
35 (comparable to assert/abort), and all the --trace output which is
36 meant for the maintainers only.
37
38 ** Horizontal tabs
39 Do not add horizontal tab characters to any file in Bison's repository
40 except where required. For example, do not use tabs to format C code.
41 However, make files, ChangeLog, and some regular expressions require
42 tabs. Also, test cases might need to contain tabs to check that Bison
43 properly processes tabs in its input.
44
45
46 * Working from the repository
47
48 These notes intend to help people working on the checked-out sources.
49 These requirements do not apply when building from a distribution tarball.
50
51 ** Requirements
52
53 We've opted to keep only the highest-level sources in the repository.
54 This eases our maintenance burden, (fewer merges etc.), but imposes more
55 requirements on anyone wishing to build from the just-checked-out sources.
56 For example, you have to use the latest stable versions of the maintainer
57 tools we depend upon, including:
58
59 - Automake <http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/>
60 - Autoconf <http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/>
61 - Flex <http://www.gnu.org/software/flex/>
62 - Gettext <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>
63 - Gzip <http://www.gnu.org/software/gzip/>
64 - Perl <http://www.cpan.org/>
65 - Rsync <http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/>
66 - Tar <http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/>
67
68 Valgrind <http://valgrind.org/> is also highly recommended, if it supports
69 your architecture.
70
71 Bison is written using Bison grammars, so there are bootstrapping
72 issues. The bootstrap script attempts to discover when the C code
73 generated from the grammars is out of date, and to bootstrap with an
74 out-of-date version of the C code, but the process is not foolproof.
75 Also, you may run into similar problems yourself if you modify Bison.
76
77 Only building the initial full source tree will be a bit painful.
78 Later, after synchronizing from the repository a plain 'make' should
79 be sufficient. Note, however, that when gnulib is updated, running
80 './bootstrap' again might be needed.
81
82 ** First checkout
83
84 Obviously, if you are reading these notes, you did manage to check out
85 this package from the repository. For the record, you will find all the
86 relevant information on:
87
88 http://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=bison
89
90 Bison uses Git submodules: subscriptions to other Git repositories.
91 In particular it uses gnulib, the GNU portability library. To ask Git
92 to perform the first checkout of the submodules, run
93
94 $ git submodule update --init
95
96 Git submodule support is weak before versions 1.6 and later, you
97 should probably upgrade Git if your version is older.
98
99 The next step is to get other files needed to build, which are
100 extracted from other source packages:
101
102 $ ./bootstrap
103
104 And there you are! Just
105
106 $ ./configure
107 $ make
108 $ make check
109
110 At this point, there should be no difference between your local copy,
111 and the master copy:
112
113 $ git diff
114
115 should output no difference.
116
117 Enjoy!
118
119 ** Updating
120
121 The use of submodules make things somewhat different because git does
122 not support recursive operations: submodules must be taken care of
123 explicitly by the user.
124
125 *** Updating Bison
126
127 If you pull a newer version of a branch, say via "git pull", you might
128 import requests for updated submodules. A simple "git diff" will
129 reveal if the current version of the submodule (i.e., the actual
130 contents of the gnulib directory) and the current request from the
131 subscriber (i.e., the reference of the version of gnulib that the
132 Bison repository requests) differ. To upgrade the submodules (i.e.,
133 to check out the version that is actually requested by the subscriber,
134 run "git submodule update".
135
136 $ git pull
137 $ git submodule update
138
139 *** Updating a submodule
140 To update a submodule, say gnulib, do as follows:
141
142 Get the most recent version of the master branch from git.
143
144 $ cd gnulib
145 $ git fetch
146 $ git checkout -b master --track origin/master
147
148 Make sure Bison can live with that version of gnulib.
149
150 $ cd ..
151 $ ./bootstrap
152 $ make distcheck
153
154 Register your changes.
155
156 $ git checkin ...
157
158 For a suggestion of what gnulib commit might be stable enough for a
159 formal release, see the ChangeLog in the latest gnulib snapshot at:
160
161 http://erislabs.net/ianb/projects/gnulib/
162
163 The Autoconf files we use are currently:
164
165 m4/m4.m4
166 lib/m4sugar/m4sugar.m4
167 lib/m4sugar/foreach.m4
168
169 These files don't change very often in Autoconf, so it should be
170 relatively straight-forward to examine the differences in order to
171 decide whether to update.
172
173 * Test suite
174
175 ** make check
176 Use liberally.
177
178 ** make maintainer-check-valgrind
179 This target uses valgrind both to check bison, and the generated parsers.
180
181 This is not mature on Mac OS X. First, Valgrind does support the way bison
182 calls m4, so Valgrind cannot be used to check bison on Mac OS X.
183
184 Second, there are many errors that come from the platform itself, not from
185 bison. build-aux/darwin11.4.0.valgrind addresses some of them.
186
187 Third, valgrind issues warnings such as:
188
189 --99312:0:syswrap- WARNING: Ignoring sigreturn( ..., UC_RESET_ALT_STACK );
190
191 which cause the test to fail uselessly. It is hard to ignore these errors
192 with a major overhaul of the way instrumentation is performed in the test
193 suite. So currently, do not try to run valgrind on Mac OS X.
194
195 ** Release checks
196 Try to run the test suite with more severe conditions before a
197 release:
198
199 - Configure the package with --enable-gcc-warnings, so that one checks
200 that 1. Bison compiles cleanly, 2. the parsers it produces compile
201 cleanly too.
202
203 - Maybe build with -DGNULIB_POSIXCHECK, which suggests gnulib modules
204 that can fix portability issues. See if you really want to pay
205 attention to its warnings; there's no need to obey blindly to it
206 (<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bison-patches/2012-05/msg00057.html>).
207
208 - Check with "make syntax-check" if there are issues diagnosed by
209 gnulib.
210
211 - run "make maintainer-check" which:
212 - runs "valgrind -q bison" to run Bison under Valgrind.
213 - runs the parsers under Valgrind.
214 - runs the test suite with G++ as C compiler...
215
216 - run "make maintainer-push-check", which runs "make maintainer-check"
217 while activating the push implementation and its pull interface wrappers
218 in many test cases that were originally written to exercise only the
219 pull implementation. This makes certain the push implementation can
220 perform every task the pull implementation can.
221
222 - run "make maintainer-xml-check", which runs "make maintainer-check"
223 while checking Bison's XML automaton report for every working grammar
224 passed to Bison in the test suite. The check just diffs the output of
225 Bison's included XSLT style sheets with the output of --report=all and
226 --graph.
227
228 - running "make maintainer-release-check" takes care of running
229 maintainer-check, maintainer-push-check and maintainer-xml-check.
230
231 - Change tests/atlocal/CFLAGS to add your preferred options. For
232 instance, "-traditional" to check that the parsers are K&R. Note
233 that it does not make sense for glr.c, which should be ANSI, but
234 currently is actually GNU C, nor for lalr1.cc.
235
236 - Test with a very recent version of GCC for both C and C++. Testing
237 with older versions that are still in use is nice too.
238
239
240 * Release Procedure
241 This section needs to be updated to take into account features from
242 gnulib. In particular, be sure to read README-release.
243
244 ** Update the submodules. See above.
245
246 ** Update maintainer tools, such as Autoconf. See above.
247
248 ** Try to get the *.pot files to the Translation Project at least one
249 week before a stable release, to give them time to translate them.
250 Before generating the *.pot files, make sure that po/POTFILES.in and
251 runtime-po/POTFILES.in list all files with translatable strings.
252 This helps: grep -l '\<_(' *
253
254 ** Tests
255 See above.
256
257 ** Update the foreign files
258 Running "./bootstrap" in the top level should update them all for you.
259 This covers PO files too. Sometimes a PO file contains problems that
260 causes it to be rejected by recent Gettext releases; please report
261 these to the Translation Project.
262
263 ** Update README
264 Make sure the information in README is current. Most notably, make sure
265 it recommends a version of GNU M4 that is compatible with the latest
266 Bison sources.
267
268 ** Check copyright years.
269 We update years in copyright statements throughout Bison once at the
270 start of every year by running "make update-copyright". However, before
271 a release, it's good to verify that it's actually been run. Besides the
272 copyright statement for each Bison file, check the copyright statements
273 that the skeletons insert into generated parsers, and check all
274 occurrences of PACKAGE_COPYRIGHT_YEAR in configure.ac.
275
276 ** Update NEWS, commit and tag.
277 See do-release-commit-and-tag in README-release. For a while, we used
278 beta names such as "2.6_rc1". Now that we use gnulib in the release
279 procedure, we must use "2.5.90", which has the additional benefit of
280 being properly sorted in "git tag -l".
281
282 ** make alpha, beta, or stable
283 See README-release.
284
285 ** Upload
286 There are two ways to upload the tarballs to the GNU servers: using
287 gnupload (from gnulib), or by hand. Obviously prefer the former. But
288 in either case, be sure to read the following paragraph.
289
290 *** Setup
291 You need "gnupg".
292
293 Make sure your public key has been uploaded at least to
294 keys.gnupg.net. You can upload it with:
295
296 gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --send-keys F125BDF3
297
298 where F125BDF3 should be replaced with your key ID.
299
300 *** Using gnupload
301 You need "ncftp".
302
303 At the end "make stable" (or alpha/beta) will display the procedure to
304 run. Just copy and paste it in your shell.
305
306 *** By hand
307
308 The generic GNU upload procedure is at:
309
310 http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Automated-FTP-Uploads
311
312 Follow the instructions there to register your information so you're permitted
313 to upload.
314
315 Here's a brief reminder of how to roll the tarballs and upload them:
316
317 *** make distcheck
318 *** gpg -b bison-2.3b.tar.gz
319 *** In a file named "bison-2.3b.tar.gz.directive", type:
320
321 version: 1.1
322 directory: bison
323 filename: bison-2.3b.tar.gz
324
325 *** gpg --clearsign bison-2.3b.tar.gz.directive
326 *** ftp ftp-upload.gnu.org # Log in as anonymous.
327 *** cd /incoming/alpha # cd /incoming/ftp for full release.
328 *** put bison-2.3b.tar.gz # This can take a while.
329 *** put bison-2.3b.tar.gz.sig
330 *** put bison-2.3b.tar.gz.directive.asc
331 *** Repeat all these steps for bison-2.3b.tar.xz.
332
333 ** Update Bison manual on www.gnu.org.
334
335 *** You need a non-anonymous checkout of the web pages directory.
336
337 $ cvs -d YOUR_USERID@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/web/bison checkout bison
338
339 *** Get familiar with the instructions for web page maintainers.
340 http://www.gnu.org/server/standards/readme_index.html
341 http://www.gnu.org/server/standards/README.software.html
342 especially the note about symlinks.
343
344 *** Build the web pages.
345 Assuming BISON_CHECKOUT refers to a checkout of the Bison dir, and
346 BISON_WWW_CHECKOUT refers to the web directory created above, do:
347
348 $ cd $BISON_CHECKOUT/doc
349 $ make stamp-vti
350 $ ../build-aux/gendocs.sh -o "$BISON_WWW_CHECKOUT/manual" \
351 bison "Bison - GNU parser generator"
352 $ cd $BISON_WWW_CHECKOUT
353
354 Verify that the result looks sane.
355
356 *** Commit the modified and the new files.
357
358 *** Remove old files.
359 Find the files which have not been overwritten (because they belonged to
360 sections that have been removed or renamed):
361
362 $ cd manual/html_node
363 $ ls -lt
364
365 Remove these files and commit their removal to CVS. For each of these
366 files, add a line to the file .symlinks. This will ensure that
367 hyperlinks to the removed files will redirect to the entire manual; this
368 is better than a 404 error.
369
370 There is a problem with 'index.html' being written twice (once for POSIX
371 function 'index', once for the table of contents); you can ignore this
372 issue.
373
374 ** Announce
375 The "make stable" (or alpha/beta) command just created a template,
376 $HOME/announce-bison-X.Y. Otherwise, to generate it, run:
377
378 make RELEASE_TYPE=alpha gpg_key_ID=F125BDF3 announcement
379
380 where alpha can be replaced by beta or stable and F125BDF3 should be
381 replaced with your key ID.
382
383 Complete/fix the announcement file. The generated list of recipients
384 (info-gnu@gnu.org, bug-bison@gnu.org, help-bison@gnu.org,
385 bison-patches@gnu.org, and coordinator@translationproject.org) is
386 appropriate for a stable release or a "serious beta". For any other
387 release, drop at least info-gnu@gnu.org. For an example of how to
388 fill out the rest of the template, search the mailing list archives
389 for the most recent release announcement.
390
391 For a stable release, send the same announcement on the comp.compilers
392 newsgroup by sending email to compilers@iecc.com. Do not make any Cc as
393 the moderator will throw away anything cross-posted or Cc'ed. It really
394 needs to be a separate message.
395
396 ** Prepare NEWS
397 So that developers don't accidentally add new items to the old NEWS
398 entry, create a new empty entry in line 3 (without the two leading
399 spaces):
400
401 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
402
403 Push these changes.
404
405 -----
406
407 Copyright (C) 2002-2005, 2007-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
408
409 This file is part of GNU Bison.
410
411 This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
412 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
413 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
414 (at your option) any later version.
415
416 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
417 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
418 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
419 GNU General Public License for more details.
420
421 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
422 along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
423
424 LocalWords: Automake Autoconf Gettext Gzip Rsync Valgrind gnulib submodules
425 LocalWords: submodule init cd distcheck checkin ChangeLog valgrind sigreturn
426 LocalWords: UC gcc DGNULIB POSIXCHECK xml XSLT glr lalr README po runtime rc
427 LocalWords: gnupload gnupg gpg keyserver BDF ncftp filename clearsign cvs dir
428 LocalWords: symlinks vti html lt POSIX Cc'ed
429
430 Local Variables:
431 mode: outline
432 fill-column: 76
433 End: