Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/3] add --confdir option to configure

[Anthony Liguori]

On 03/19/2012 11:20 AM, Eduardo Habkost wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 05:13:22PM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> > Il 19/03/2012 16:43, Eduardo Habkost ha scritto:
> > > > No, I'm not suggesting --package-name, I'm suggesting that qemu-kvm
> > > > would carry a patch to configure that changed a fixed PACKAGE_NAME
> > > > define.
> > >
> > > Are you really suggesting that forcing downstream to carry a patch is
> > > better than having a configure option?
> >
> > Not downstream as in RHEL; downstream as in qemu-kvm which is a fork anyway.
> >
> > > If you suggest making it configurable using a variable on the 'make'
> > > command-line it would be OK, but I kind of hoped that no modern software
> > > project would ever require packagers to use configure-by-sed methods to
> > > set build parameters.
> >
> > I think the package name is a pretty special case.  Even with autotools,
> > it's pretty much the only thing that requires configure-by-sed to change it.
>
> I still don't understand why, except that it's a limitation of the build
> system implementation. If we don't have that restriction, I don't see
> why this should be restricted by design.

Because rebranding QEMU is not something we want to actively encourage 
downstreams to do.  The fact that qemu-kvm does this is a historical artifact 
that we'll hopefully kill off in the near future.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> Anyway, even if we decide that package name shouldn't be changed: why
> changing mandir, docdir and datadir doesn't require changing the package
> name, but changing /etc/qemu has to?