Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH] Fix checksum writing in signboot.sh

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

Alexander Graf wrote:
>
> On 02.08.2009, at 13:15, Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> On 08/02/2009 01:25 PM, Filip Navara wrote:
>>>> While the patch is good, the code is unreadable.  Can we mandate 
>>>> python for
>>>> such tricks?
>>>>
>>>
>>> No, please, no! Throwing additional tools at the problem is only going
>>> to make it worse for Windows users. I'm not happy with using sh script
>>> as it already added dependency on coreutils, but at least that's easy
>>> to install. Python is a nightmare compared to that.
>>>
>>
>> Is Python really so difficult to install under Windows?  How many 
>> times do you have to click 'Next'?
>>
>> Note that Windows users can usually use prebuilt binaries, so the 
>> 'Next' nightmare only affects a small number of Windows developers.
>>
>>> BTW, for years in ReactOS we had a way to build host tools with host
>>> CC and these tools were written in plain ordinary C. This worked great
>>> for both Windows and Linux builds and also for cross-compiling.
>>>
>>
>> But then you have to write those tools in C, which is annoying.
>
> Right. In fact we just switched from C to sh for portability reasons.

The problem is with cross compilers.  Our build system is based around a 
single tool chain and we only do feature probing, sanity checking, 
cflags modifications, etc. on the target tool chain.  If we build and 
run a C program using the host compiler (which is needed in order to be 
able to run the program), things get complicated quickly.

sh is preferred because it's a minimal dependency.  I would be concerned 
about perl or python for the main build because those tools aren't 
available by default for windows.  For something like a rom where we 
ship a default binary, as long as we detected the appropriate tools and 
disabled the build, I think it would be more reasonable.

> I really think we should just make the current code work as is and be 
> done. The script is pretty small and really readable IMHO.

We're going to have to revisit this for pc-bios since it depends on perl 
and it has a similar rom signing tool (biossums).  It's far more 
sophisticated though and it's currently implemented in C.  It may make 
sense to rewrite that tool in python/perl and have a single tool used 
for all of our roms.

We don't need to do this now though.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori