Re: Cleaning up contrib/ and tools/

[Pierrick Bouvier <pierrick.bouvier@linaro.org>]

On 3/24/26 11:33 AM, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Mar 2026 at 18:28, Pierrick Bouvier
> <pierrick.bouvier@linaro.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 3/24/26 10:09 AM, Peter Maydell wrote:
>>> 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/
>>>    * contrib/plugins moves to plugins/plugins (or a different subdir
>>>      name of your choice)
>>>
>>
>> I would suggest plugins/contrib or plugins/community, to make clear they
>> are the community contributed ones.
>> @Alex, do you have a different suggestion/preference?
> 
> I firmly do not want us to have anything that claims to be
> "contrib" or "community" or similar. Everything in QEMU is
> community contributed in some sense. Either we care about
> and maintain these plugins, in which case call them "plugins",
> or we do not in fact care about and maintain them, in which
> case delete them. "In the tree but not maintained" is not
> a category I think we should have, and that is what "contrib"
> generally implies.
>

We make sure they build, and test them (manually) on changes. The only 
difference with tests/tcg/plugins is that those are used for make 
check-tcg. I personnally consider both of them as properly maintained.

>> Moving those sources will break build folder hierarchy also, which is an
>> issue for all existing binaries built from contrib anyway.
>> I'm not sure there is anything sane to do to fix that except accepting
>> the breaking change.
> 
> What are we breaking here ? Nothing outside QEMU ought to be
> depending on the layout of our source tree. When we move things
> around we'll update the meson.build and the documentation.
> I don't think we have 'contrib' in our installed-locations
> layout (tools get installed into the bin/ dir, for instance),
> but I might have missed something.
>

I was thinking more about users that might have custom scripts using 
various contrib plugins, or using vhost-* binaries or ivshmem-server or 
elf2dmp. They will be relocated because meson automatically uses layout 
of sources in build folder.
It's not a big deal anyway.

> -- PMM

Regards,
Pierrick