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

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

> 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.