Re: [PATCH v2 0/6] meson: use subprojects for bundled projects

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

On Fri, 19 May 2023 at 10:32, Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, May 19, 2023 at 10:21:03AM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > On Fri, 19 May 2023 at 09:56, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > QEMU bundles a copy of dtc and keycodemapdb.  They both support meson,
> > > so we can run their build system via subproject() instead of hardcoding
> > > their contents.
> > >
> > > In fact, now that QEMU's configure script knows how to install missing
> > > Python dependencies, we can replace submodules altogether with .wrap
> > > files, which have several advantages, either immediate or potential:
> >
> > So do we have a path for getting rid of submodules entirely?
> > I'd be all in favour of that, but I'm somewhat less in favour
> > of "some things are submodules and some things are this new
> > .wrap file setup"...
>
> I think we can ignore 'roms' submodules on the basis they are never used
> during a normal build, they're mostly just a maintainer convenience and
> for release archive source bundling.

Yeah, I agree -- or at least I agree they're a distinct use of
submodules. We might at some point want to look at whether there's
a better way to deal with ROM blobs than what we do today, especially
as the size of the source archives for things like UEFI is much
bigger than I expect anybody anticipated when they set the rom
blob machinery up. I don't think the way we do ROM blobs is
very convenient for our distro downstreams either.

-- PMM