Re: Can I contribute Vitastor block driver? Or maybe introduce a QAPI plugin system?

[Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>]

I'm not speaking for the QEMU project.  I hope to be helpful anyway.  I
am the QAPI maintainer, so my thoughts carry a bit more weight there.

I understand your block driver depends on your libvitastor_client
library.

Dependencies that aren't available on at least one supported build
platform (and thus covered by CI) are problematic.  For Linux,
"available" generally means "provided by the distribution".  I doubt
there's a way around getting your library packaged by distributions.

The QAPI schema is (for better or worse) fixed at compile time by
design.  Changing that would be a major undertaking.  Whether the
benefits could justify the costs and risks seems rather doubtful to me.

In my experience, the project invites contributions, not out-of-tree
extensions.  The latter require external interfaces, which can only be
harder to maintain than internal ones.  There's also the risk of abuse
to circumvent the GPL (I have absolutely no reason to assume you'd try
that!).