Re: [PATCH 0/4] Add meson wrap fallback for slirp & dtc

[Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>]

On 3/6/23 11:06, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
>> This offers developpers a simpler way to build QEMU with missing system
>> dependencies (ex, libslirp in my case), but also simplify the fallback build
>> definition of dtc/libfdt.
> Do we actually need this facility though ? We've already determined
> that every platform we need has libslirp now, and IIUC Thomas determined
> recently that dtc is also available everywhere we need it to be.

libvfio-user can use Meson subprojects instead of submodules, too; and 
with Pip support probably coming in 8.1, we can remove the meson 
submodule.  Then, the only mostly-mandatory submodule would be 
keycodemapdb; SLOF requires a cross-compiler and the pre-built is binary 
is shipped binary, while softfloat/testfloat are test only and maybe 
could even be embedded.  So there is a path towards getting rid of 
submodules at least for the main QEMU build process.

Also, Windows installer builds could benefit from having wrapdb support 
for the mandatory dependencies in Windows (pixman, zlib, glib, possibly 
SDL).

Since they are unintrusive and easy to revert, I think we could include 
patches 1-3 as experimental in 8.0, though I'm happy to oblige if people 
disagree (and only include patch 1).

Paolo