Re: [Qemu-devel] RFC: changing ROM bundling in tar dists for releases

[Gerd Hoffmann]

  Hi,

> > - The qemu release dists get ever larger as we add more ROMS.
> > Adding
> >    EFI ROM builds for i386, x86_64, and aarch64 will make the dists
> >    larger still.
> 
> I think these make sense. Should we tie this into the
> recent suggestion (by Gerd?) that we should put all the
> rom blobs into git submodules, and otherwise generally
> try to regularise our handling of blobs?

It surely makes sense to consider both together, so we can work out a
reasonable workflow for firmware updates and distribution.

I think it makes sense to create a separate project for the firmware
blobs.  Move over the firmware binaries and source submodules to the
new project.  This way updating both firmware sources and binaries can
be done with a single commit, like we handle this today, just in the
new firmware repo instead of the main qemu repo.

When moving only the binaries to a separate git submodule and
continuing to have the sources as main qemu repo submodules firmware
updates become more complicated.

> >   3. Change existing dist, and add a new one with bundled bits
> > 
> >        qemu-X.Y.Z.tar.bz2 - qemu source only
> >        qemu-addons-X.Y.Z.tar.bz2 - bundled ROMS + libs

With the scheme above it makes sense to have a qemu-firmware-
${version}.tar.gz addon tarball.  Maybe even two (one with the prebuilt
binaries and one with the sources).

Question is what to do with the non-firmware submodules (pixman, dtc,
more?) then.  I think they are not that big, so I doubt it is worth the
hassle to create two tarball versions.  And license-wise it isn't a
issue too.

cheers,
  Gerd