Re: [RFC] Move tools sources to the tools directory (was Re: [PATCH v2] MAINTAINERS: Fix the location of tools manuals)

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 04/02/21 15:50, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Feb 2021 at 14:47, Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
> > The distinction of contrib/ vs tools/ is supposed to be more a
> > reflection on the quality of the program.
> >
> > contrib/ should be considered demo-ware, no back compat guaranteed,
> > may or may not work, no testing guaranteed, no man pages.
>
> On this definition, why do we have any of it in our source tree?
> Interesting but unmaintained side things can live quite happily
> elsewhere (other peoples' git forks, blog posts, whatever).
> If we care about a bit of code enough to keep it in our source
> tree we ought to care about it enough to properly document
> and test it and give it a suitable place to live.

That's indeed what happened with libvhost-user; it has graduated to a 
separate project since it is okay for use in other (production-ready) 
vhost-user backends.

Most of the software in contrib/ is essentially a reference 
implementations.  They are "perfect" for that task, but not meant to 
grow more features or to be used in production (compare vhost-user-blk 
with qemu-storage-daemon for example).

The other four can be classified as follows:

- elf2dmp and rdmacm-mux should be in tools/, probably it's in contrib/ 
because nobody uses it and there's no tests so it might bitrot.

- systemd is just a couple files meant for distros to pick up, possibly 
with customizations.  gitdm is just for people who want to get QEMU 
development stats, so I suppose these two are in the same group as well.

Paolo