Re: RFC: Why dont we move to newer capstone?

[Thomas Huth]

On 15/10/2019 10.27, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 05, 2019 at 02:33:34PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
>> On Sat, 5 Oct 2019 at 11:21, Lucien Murray-Pitts
>> <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> Whilst working on a m68k patch I noticed that the capstone in use
>>> today (3.0) doesnt support the M68K and thus a hand turned disasm
>>> function is used.
>>>
>>> The newer capstone (5.0) appears to support a few more CPU, inc. m68k.
>>>
>>> Why we move to this newer capstone?
>>
>> Moving to a newer capstone sounds like a good idea. The only
>> reason we haven't moved forward as far as I'm aware is that
>> nobody has done the work to send a patch to do that move
>> forward to the newer version. Richard Henderson would
>> probably know if there was any other blocker.
> 
> Bearing in mind our distro support policy, we need to continue to
> support 3.0 series of capstone for a while yet based on what I
> see in various distros. eg Ubuntu 18.04 LTS has 3.0.4, as does
> Fedora 29.  Version 4.0 is only in a few very new distros:
> 
>    https://repology.org/project/capstone/versions
> 
> We can of course use features from newer capstone, *provided* we correctly
> do conditional compilation so that we can still build against 3.0 series
> on distros that have that version.

We're embedding the capstone submodule in the release tarballs, so I
think we're independent from the distro release, aren't we? So this
should not be an issue, as far as I can see.

 Thomas