Re: [PATCH 0/4] Add meson wrap fallback for slirp & dtc

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Mon, Mar 06, 2023 at 12:36:25PM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On 3/6/23 11:06, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > > This offers developpers a simpler way to build QEMU with missing system
> > > dependencies (ex, libslirp in my case), but also simplify the fallback 
> > > build
> > > definition of dtc/libfdt.
> > Do we actually need this facility though ? We've already determined
> > that every platform we need has libslirp now, and IIUC Thomas determined
> > recently that dtc is also available everywhere we need it to be.
> 
> libvfio-user can use Meson subprojects instead of submodules, too; and with
> Pip support probably coming in 8.1, we can remove the meson submodule.
> Then, the only mostly-mandatory submodule would be keycodemapdb;

On the topic of keycodemapdb, we designed it as a copylib thing because
it seemed like the simplest approach, but I have wondered whether we
should change tack and promote it as installable data package.

Basically the keycodemap-gen tool ino /usr/bin, and CSV data file into
/usr/share, and perhaps add a pkg-config file to enable apps to query
its existance / path to keycodemap-gen ?

The main downside is we would need to promise back compat of the CLI
tool. The upside is that consumers of it would eliminate a git submodule
and in theory be more up2date, though that depends on the distros actually
updating the datafile periodically.  I'm really on the fence about whether
its worth it vs carrying on as a submodule (or meson subproject if that's
nicer long term).

With regards,
Daniel
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