Re: [Libguestfs] [p2v PATCH] build: remove gnulib

On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 03:24:46PM +0000, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote: > On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 04:16:18PM +0100, Laszlo Ersek wrote: >> It turns out that all we need from gnulib @ 253f29d8b391 is xstrtoull(), >> ignore_value(), and assure(), when building on Fedora 35 anyway. > > I guess the question is what OS distros is p2v targetting ? > > With very rare exceptions, Fedora has never really needed much of the > platform portability stuff from gnulib. > > The primary benefit from gnulib comes if needing to target FreeBSD, > macOS, Windows or somewhat old Linux like older RHEL versions, fixing > their many flaws to make them operate more like modern Fedora would. From our point of view virt-p2v always runs inside a Linux live ISO environment. I don't even know if *BSD has a concept of live CDs but if they do and they want P2V then patches are welcome. We can still virtualize *BSD machines even using the Linux ISO, although it would require virt-v2v to support *BSD which it does not right now. >> Constructing this patch must be the most arbitrary "programming" I've ever >> done. It started with capturing the output of "gnulib-tool" (invoked >> through "autogen.sh" -> "bootstrap"), then trimming it as much as >> possible, guided by libguestfs commit 0f54df53d26e ("build: Remove >> gnulib.", 2021-04-08), then filling in any new gaps. >> >> (The "manywarnings" functionality falls victim to this patch as well -- if >> that change was good enough for libguestfs, then so should it be for >> virt-p2v.) > > That need not be the case. It is pretty trivial to use "manywarnings" > functionality in isolation from anything else related to gnulib, as > it is nicely self contained. Just copy the manywarnings.m4 and > warnings.m4 files out of gnulib.git into your local m4/ directory. > > We did this for libvirt and quite a few other virt userspace projects > before we eventually switched to using meson. Yup, manywarnings is a nice feature of gnulib. I think this (Laszlo's) patch looks great as it is now, so ACK. (With or without adding manywarnings.)