Re: [PATCH 0/6] build contrib/plugins using meson

[Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>]

On Thu, 15 Aug 2024 at 19:38, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Aug 15, 2024 at 8:04 PM Pierrick Bouvier
> <pierrick.bouvier@linaro.org> wrote:
> > > One argument from moving contrib/plugins to meson is that the Windows
> > > case depends on libqemu_plugin_api.a which is built with meson(*);
> > > that said, libqemu_plugin_api.a should be installed - which would
> > > justify it being used from an "external" makefile.
> >
> > You need meson to build this lib in the first place, so I guess that
> > 99.9% of the people writing a plugin will have a qemu source tree (with
> > access to plugin headers), and first compile the lib.
>
> Note that the lib is built at configure time, not Make time.  It's not
> a normal library.
>
> > I am not convinced by the scenario where people build this out of tree
> > to be honest, but I may be wrong.
>
> The idea is that people copy the Makefile, and yeah I'm not sure
> either if they do it but it can be useful.

The original theory was that since plugins are supposed to
be independent of QEMU version that we should have the
build system also be independent of QEMU (and perhaps that
plugins might not be in the QEMU source tree at all some day).
That's why they're in contrib/ (though I am not a fan of
contrib/ as an organizational category in the filesystem...)

-- PMM