On 9/21/19 2:59 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
Is it usable without any plugins? Does the null plugin take much space? I wouldn't think so. Would it be too messy to just ship the null plugin unconditionally, even if just for this particular purpose?
Right! My original plan was that we could change the API to drop all required callbacks. The "null" plugin would become the plugin which had no callbacks and could therefore be built in to the nbdkit binary.
Unfortunately my plan doesn't quite work because the null plugin has a config parameter (nbdkit-zero-plugin is more like this "null" plugin). Oh well.
Yeah, the 'zero' plugin is a lot more compact than the 'null' plugin. Do we have to ship a separate nbdkit-zero.so, or could we make nbdkit itself behave as if the zero plugin were in use if no actual plugin is dlloaded?
On the other hand any program that relies on such probing to work might depend not only on nbdkit, but also on the null plugin.
Indeed, or as you say above we could package one of the regular plugins with the server to guarantee it is always available.
Even if we require a plugin, always packaging the zero plugin along with nbdkit seems reasonable (we'd have to tweak the docs a bit to mention which plugin we settle on as being always available). -- Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer Red Hat, Inc. +1-919-301-3226 Virtualization: qemu.org | libvirt.org