Re: [PATCH 0/4] Add meson wrap fallback for slirp & dtc

[Peter Maydell]

On Mon, 6 Mar 2023 at 10:06, Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 02, 2023 at 05:18:44PM +0400, marcandre.lureau@redhat.com wrote:
> > From: Marc-André Lureau <marcandre.lureau@redhat.com>
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > Meson "wrap" is a mechanism to build dependencies that doesn't rely on git
> > submodules and integrate external dependencies as subproject()s.
> >
> > This offers developpers a simpler way to build QEMU with missing system
> > dependencies (ex, libslirp in my case), but also simplify the fallback build
> > definition of dtc/libfdt.
>
> Do we actually need this facility though ? We've already determined
> that every platform we need has libslirp now, and IIUC Thomas determined
> recently that dtc is also available everywhere we need it to be.
>
> So why would we want to continue to special case these two libraries,
> out of all the many many many other libraries we also have deps on.

Also, it looks like the wrap mechanism is still basically "we have
a file that indicates what the external git URL of the dependency
is and specifies a commit hash to use", it's just changing the
mechanism we use to get the source from git submodules to this
new thing. Maybe the new thing really is better -- certainly
git submodules are absolutely awful -- but we should have one
mechanism, not two.

thanks
-- PMM