NVIDIA / NVIDIA/nvcf

tools/changelog-site: a compiled binary is committed to the repository

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Dominant language
Go
Stars
218
Forks
72
Avg merge
1d 12h
Merged PRs (30d)
427

Description

tools/changelog-site/changelog-site is a checked-in ELF executable.

$ git ls-files -s tools/changelog-site/changelog-site
100755 25adb8ea304a237d1822041791aafefe0408f4e6 0	tools/changelog-site/changelog-site
$ git cat-file -s 25adb8ea304a237d1822041791aafefe0408f4e6
4275095

4,275,095 bytes, mode 100755, ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64. It sits next to main.go and go.mod, so it looks like go build output committed by accident rather than a deliberate artifact.

Two consequences:

  • Running go build in that directory rewrites the tracked file, so anyone working on the tool gets a spurious 4 MB modification in git status. That is how this surfaced, while adding tools/ci/check-go-tools in #1224.
  • Every clone carries the binary, and every rebuild of it adds another 4 MB blob to history.

Suggested fix

git rm --cached tools/changelog-site/changelog-site
printf "# Build output from `go build` in this directory.\n/changelog-site\n" > tools/changelog-site/.gitignore

tools/ci-health/.gitignore already does exactly this for the same reason, so the pattern is established.

Worth confirming first that nothing invokes the committed binary directly rather than go run -C tools/changelog-site .; a grep found no such caller, but the tool owner would know.

Not fixed in #1224 because it is unrelated to that change.

References

#1224

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start in tools/changelog-site with main.go, go.mod, the tracked changelog-site binary, and its .gitignore. Confirm no caller invokes the committed executable directly, then remove the binary from tracking and ignore go build output, following tools/ci-health/.gitignore. Done means rebuilding the tool no longer changes git status and the binary is absent from the repository.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
git, go
Domain
build-system, tooling
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
1/5
Estimated time
Under an hour
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Clearly specified
Newbie friendliness
90/100

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