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

[Philippe Mathieu-Daudé]

On 2/4/21 4:06 PM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 04, 2021 at 04:02:01PM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> 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.

Why keep something nobody uses?