Re: Cleaning up contrib/ and tools/

[Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>]

Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> writes:

> We have a couple of directories in our source tree which have
> accumulated things in them that don't really belong there; this is a
> proposal to clean up by moving things to more appropriate locations
> (as 11.1 work, obviously).
>
> Firstly, contrib/ has a tendency to be a dumping ground for stuff that
> we didn't think hard enough about finding a good home for, and for
> things in a weird "not really maintained" state. We should either
> (a) care enough about something to give it a correct home and to
> maintain it, or (b) not care about it, and kick it out of our tree.
>
> Secondly, tools/ exists but is very under-used. I think it should be
> for the set of standalone tools that we build if you configure
> --enable-tools and which we document in docs/tools.  Currently it
> contains two things, one of which doesn't match that idea...
>
> So, starting with tools/:

[...]

> And for contrib/, easy ones first:
>  * contrib/vhost-user-{blk,bridge,gpu,input,scsi} move to tools/
>  * contrib/elf2dmp moves to tools/
>  * contrib/ivshmem-client and contrib/ivshmem-server move to tools/

Absolutely not.  This is example code, provided in the hope of helping
people understand the protocol, and experiment with it.  It is entirely
unfit for more serious use, and that's intentional.

If somebody contributes something fit for more serious use, and there's
interest in maintaining it in that role going forward, and that code is
still simple enough to serve the example code's purpose as described
above, we can drop the example code from contrib/.

We could also drop it without replacement just to have an empty
contrib/.  I think that would be a disservice to people trying to use
ivshmem.  But then I'm the guy who keeps telling people *not* to use it,
so why should I care?

Perhaps contrib/ is not a good home for example code.  It seems to
bother people whose judgement I respect.  Can we find a better home?

>  * contrib/plugins moves to plugins/plugins (or a different subdir
>    name of your choice)
>
> For contrib/, ones I'm less sure about:

[...]