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

[vitalif@yourcmc.ru]

Ok, thank you very much for the information!

So I should first try to make my library available in one of the distros used for CI. As I understand these are Alpine, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS and OpenSUSE. OK, I'll try it first :)

Regarding QAPI, I'd say it would be cool if it was allowed... I'm not sure if GPL circumvention is a real risk, because in some way it's already possible via the vhost-user protocol %). But it's up to you to decide of course :)

> 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!).