On Tue, Jun 28, 2022 at 12:21:39PM +0200, Thomas Huth wrote:
On 28/06/2022 12.03, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
[...]
For biosbits if we are going this route then I feel a submodule is much
better. It records which version exactly each qemu version wants.
As far as I know, you can also specify the version when using pip, can't
you? So that's not really an advantage here.
On the contrary, submodules have a couple of disadvantages that I really
dislike:
- submodules do not get updated automatically when doing a "git checkout",
we have to update them via a script instead. This causes e.g. trouble if you
rsync your source tree to a machine that has no access to the internet and
you forgot to update the submodule before the sync
- the content of submodules is not added to the tarballs that get created on
the git forges automatically. There were lots of requests from users in the
past that tried to download a tarball from github and then wondered why they
couldn't compile QEMU.
- we include the submodule content in our release tarballs, so people get
the impression that hte submodule content is part of the QEMU sources. This
has two disadvantages:
* We already got bug reports for the code in the submodule,
where people did not understand that they should report that
rather to the original project instead (i.e. you ship it - you
own it)
* People get the impression that QEMU is a huge monster
application if they count the number of code lines, run
their code scanner tools on the tarball contents, etc.
Remember "nemu", for example, where one of the main complaints
was that QEMU has too many lines of code?
- If programs includes code via submodules, this gets a higher
burder for distro maintainers, since they have to patch each
and every package when there is a bug, instead of being able to
fix it in one central place.
So in my opinion we should avoid new submodules if there is an alternative.
Thomas
So looking at the latest proposals downloading files from CI,
checksumming them etc etc. No auto checkout, not added automatically
either, right?
This seems to be the only difference:
- we include the submodule content in our release tarballs
How about we just fix that? Thomas would that address your
concern at least wrt tests?