Re: Cleaning up contrib/ and tools/

["Marc-André Lureau" <marcandre.lureau@gmail.com>]

Hi

On Wed, Mar 25, 2026 at 1:22 PM Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 11:44:37AM -0700, Pierrick Bouvier wrote:
> > On 3/24/26 11:33 AM, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > > On Tue, 24 Mar 2026 at 18:28, Pierrick Bouvier
> > > > 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.
>
> If we're concerned about external users relying on stuff in contrib/,
> then that is exactly the reason why contrib/ should go, and everything
> be considered an officially supported deliverable of QEMU with an
> appropriate home in the source tree, and covered by 'make install'.

A solution worth considering is to split into various meson
subprojects. I did it for libslirp, libvhost-user, and started qga a
few years ago (https://patchew.org/QEMU/20220810124857.1360211-1-marcandre.lureau@redhat.com/)

This requires a bit of reorganization to have some common (internal)
libraries, but imho, we would make the whole project cleaner that way.

-- 
Marc-André Lureau