Re: Cleaning up contrib/ and tools/

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

On Wed, Mar 25, 2026 at 04:49:57PM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Mar 2026 at 11:44, Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> writes:
> >
> > > We have a couple of directories in our source tree which have
> > > accumulated things in them that don't really belong there; this is a
> > > proposal to clean up by moving things to more appropriate locations
> > > (as 11.1 work, obviously).
> > >
> > > Firstly, contrib/ has a tendency to be a dumping ground for stuff that
> > > we didn't think hard enough about finding a good home for, and for
> > > things in a weird "not really maintained" state. We should either
> > > (a) care enough about something to give it a correct home and to
> > > maintain it, or (b) not care about it, and kick it out of our tree.
> > >
> > > Secondly, tools/ exists but is very under-used. I think it should be
> > > for the set of standalone tools that we build if you configure
> > > --enable-tools and which we document in docs/tools.  Currently it
> > > contains two things, one of which doesn't match that idea...
> > >
> > > So, starting with tools/:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > > 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/
> >
> > Absolutely not.  This is example code, provided in the hope of helping
> > people understand the protocol, and experiment with it.  It is entirely
> > unfit for more serious use, and that's intentional.
> 
> So, example code but we don't think it's a good example ? :-)
> 
> Our system documentation seems to assume you're going to run
> ivshmem-server:
> 
> https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/devices/ivshmem.html
> 
> > Perhaps contrib/ is not a good home for example code.  It seems to
> > bother people whose judgement I respect.  Can we find a better home?
> 
> I'm not sure to what extent we should be in the business of
> providing example code. If we are doing that we should label
> it all a bit better...

FWIW, the server does warn the user on startup since Markus commited
a335c6f204eefba8ff935bcee8f31f51d2174119:


+    /*
+     * Do not remove this notice without adding proper error handling!
+     * Start with handling ivshmem_server_send_one_msg() failure.
+     */
+    printf("*** Example code, do not use in production ***\n");


With regards,
Daniel
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