Bug#1068174: yosys: Please package the latest upstream release

[Daniel Gröber]

Hi Scott,

On Wed, Feb 05, 2025 at 12:58:54PM +0000, Scott Ashcroft wrote:
> I understand that but you've also made more work for yourself by not
> looking at the newer upstream versions.
> A lot of the issues in the docs build, which seems to be the biggest
> issue, have been addressed there.

Indeed they have, because I sent them the fix after meditating on the
same old 0.33 code for the n-th time.

  https://github.com/YosysHQ/yosys/issues?q=involves%3ADanielG%20

Staying on upstream is just extra work when you're the one producing the
pertinent fixes by taking the time to debug problems and not just flailing
around :-P

Debugging takes time and understanding tho. When upstream rejigs everything
understanding goes away.

> > The very first step for reviewing a new upstream version is always
> > copyright/DFSG review which is just going to take a serious amount of
> > time right off the bat with 43k lines added in this case.
> 
> I understand that too and that's why I was a bit shocked that my
> changes just got merged. I really expected them to sit as an MR which
> might have been useful at some point in the future.

Git is generally not the critical path in Debian. Unlike with upstream few
people use the git repos directly. Generally just the DDs involved and they
still have to manually review and upload the changes so some treat git more
lightly.

> > Your MR in particular was looking very good but missing a lot of
> > context on the doc side of things: why is presentation.pdf being
> > removed?
> 
> Upstream removed it between versions 0.39 and 0.40. The commit that
> kills it, and the whole manual directory, is "Move the last
> presentation slides" but there's no further explanation.
> My guess is it was just out of date as it was written in the very early
> days of the project.

Perhaps. This is the sort of thing where ideally we'd communicate with
upstream to find out what's going on ;-)

However, looking at
https://github.com/YosysHQ-Docs/YosysHQ-Docs/issues/30 and
https://github.com/YosysHQ/yosys/pull/3907 it seems the intent was simply
to move the content to the sphinx doc so it should be fine.

> > justification for dropping patches
> > (upstreamed/obsoleted/conflicting..)?
> 
> Looking back on it, I should have made better commit messages for
> those, but I've been tweaking the patches for more than a year so it
> really felt like a simple refresh.

If you want to make things easy on DDs and yourself my recommendation would
be to put this sort of commentary in d/changelog, not git commitmsgs, as
that's more compatible with different workflows in Debian.

Say you do end up having to go the mentors route, then your git commits may
not even get looked at (depends on reviewer), however the debian/ files
always are.

I'm not 100% sure this is the-done-thing since changelog is usually more
user-facing and less reviewer-facing. I did the same thing as you before
becoming a DD, but my thinking is that the DD uploading can always opt to
remove superfluous changelog entries, but they might just ignore you if the
amount of commentary is not to their liking so better to opt for more info
in changelog.
See also
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/best-pkging-practices.en.html#best-practices-for-debian-changelog

> I'll try to explain things here:
> 
> abc/0006-Fix-spelling-errors.patch
> Upstream have fixed the spelling issues.

Oh yeah that was me years ago https://github.com/YosysHQ/abc/pull/13 :)

> switch-to-free-font.patch
> The presentation is gone and luximono isn't mentioned elsewhere.
> 
> 0021-Fix-global-cache-destruction-in-IdString-class.patch
> Upstream have refactored the IdString class and deprecated parts of it.
> That makes this patch obsolete.

Finally. :-)

> 0023-Use-SOURCE-DATE-EPOCH-for-docs.patch
> The files affected by this no longer exist.

Not so ffast there. they got moved:
./docs/source/_images/primer/basics_flow.tex

See b6e61c16b ("docs: restructuring images directory").

> 0024-Fix-docs-images-tidy-race.patch
> Upstream have changed the docs build so that tidy is only used during
> clean.
> 
> 0025-Remove-emoji-causing-latex-errors.patch
> The file affected by this no longer exist. I couldn't find any other
> emojis in the latex source.
> 
> > did you even test
> > the new docs build?
> 
> Yes. It builds fine even with -j16. Upstream have now made the docs
> target depend on docs/prep which seems to fix the races seen in earlier
> versions.
> In my version of 0.44 I had a bunch of extra steps in debian/rules just
> to get things to build to completion but those are not required any
> more.

Did you have a look over the pdf, does it look alright? Could you attach
it?

> > What about reproducibility testing? (since you're
> > removing a SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH patch).
> 
> I'm looking at that now and I can see that the manual.pdf produced
> isn't reproducible. The upstream Makefile seemed to be addressing the
> issue but obviously not completely.
> I expect that something like the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH patch is required
> but I'm happy to work on that.

You'll want to look at `reprotest`. There's also `debrepro` but that one's
no longer really used. I had trouble reproducing failures locally. Since
unstable is broken rn anyway we could also just upload when ready to find
out.

Thanks,
--Daniel
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