Re: [Qemu-devel] Unmaintained QEMU builds

[Kevin Wolf]

Am 16.08.2010 22:42, schrieb Anthony Liguori:
> On 08/16/2010 01:51 PM, Blue Swirl wrote:
>> On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 9:42 PM, Anthony Liguori<address@hidden>  wrote:
>>> Historically, even when Windows builds, it spends large periods of time not
>>> actually working.  I think Stefan can confirm this.  Much of the platform
>>> specific code is way behind (like the block layer) and has been for many
>>> years.
>>>
>>> I can't remember the last time someone sent a Win32 enhancement for platform
>>> code.
>>>
>>> Given that it's known to have a lot of issues, I would suggest that we
>>> schedule Windows host support for deprecation in 0.15.  I would not
>>> recommend that we remove any of the WIN32 code from the build but basically
>>> stop trying to make it even build until someone steps up to really actively
>>> maintain and enhance the Windows port.  I would still suggest we take
>>> patches if anyone wants to submit them but we should not avoid patches that
>>> are known to break win32 (unless the fix is trivial).
>>>      
>> The same strategy applied to all hosts would probably eventually break
>> everything but Linux on x86 with KVM
> 
> I don't think that's true but I do agree that we'd lose a lot of 
> features.  But if the features aren't being used by anyone and they 
> consistently don't work, does it matter?

I know more than one user for qemu on win32. However, they are just
that: users. Maybe they could be motivated to do a build fix if things
break (just like we do right now). They probably don't care about active
development (which is what you want to require) because it seems to work
"good enough". Of course, they still get improvements that are done in
the platform independent parts and I'm sure they would be unhappy about
win32 support being dropped in future versions.

>> . There have been very few patches
>> for Darwin, *Solaris, AIX or BSDs, non-x86 targets or non-x86 host
>> CPUs. Without Darwin or BSD host support, darwin-user and bsd-user
>> will be useless. When did we get Xen patches last time before the
>> recent patch set?
>>    
> 
> Let's put things in perspective though.  Win32 support has been in bad 
> shape for years and no one really seems to care.   It's been sorely 
> behind since at least when Fabrice introduced AIO support for Linux 
> without ever doing it properly in Windows.

So what? If I were to choose between working code that is not on par
with Linux or no code at all, I think I would pick the former.

Kevin