Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH] Drop roms from standard build

[Paul Brook]

> > Also, x86 is only one of many targets qemu supports. If you're serious
> > about rebuilding roms as standard, then at bare minimum you need to
> > handle sparc and ppc as well as x86.
>
> Yup.  That's why we need to probe for toolchains in order to determine
> whether roms can be built.  If you're a developer making changes to
> OpenBIOS, clearly you are going to have the appropriate tool chains
> installed.

IMO a developer changes to a rom is a special case.

If you're arguing that roms should be built by default, for everyone, then I 
disagree and don't think this is feasible. Most users simply don't have the 
prerequisites, and don't want to have to cofigure everything even when they 
do.  If you care about this (for reproducibility or licencing reasons) then it 
should be all or nothing. I don't buy "It works for x86-on-x86 most of the 
time" as a valid argument for anything. We either build things by default, or 
we include binaries, not both.

If you're talking about developers modifying the roms, then most of the 
arguments above still apply. Chances are you're only actually interested in 
one rom anyway, so building it separately really isn't significant extra 
hassle.

Having everything in one source tree maybe makes sense. Except that most roms 
are already used by several projects. What you really want is to coordinate 
releases with the upstream maintainers, having a qemu branck/fork if it's 
really that hard to get changes integrated back.  In the case of the pc-bios 
it probably wants to be split into a sparate project, rather than being part 
of bochs.

Paul