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

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Sep 01, 2017 at 10:31:17AM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>   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.

I've always wondered why we need to specialcase those modules at all.
Personally I'd just remove them entirely and let people install the
-dev packages on their distro just like they do for any other build
prerequisite of QEMU.

Regards,
Daniel
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