Re: Cleaning up contrib/ and tools/

["Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>]

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'.

With regards,
Daniel
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