Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 4/7] libcacard: initial commit

[Alon Levy]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 01:42:56PM +0100, Jes Sorensen wrote:
> On 03/14/11 17:40, Alon Levy wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 04:20:22PM +0100, Jes Sorensen wrote:
> > 
> > ok, here is a note where I kinda ignored my own wishes but I want
> > to be very clear on them:
> >  libcacard should not be part of qemu.
> >  it is here because I once thought it would speed things up.
> > 
> > So I'm not taking it out or anything - it's fine with me that it
> > goes into qemu, just as long as it's understood that I'm now maintaining
> > another copy of it for usage outside of qemu, in the spice client (or
> > any other client for that matter - it will be the same when we do vnc
> > support for this).
> 
> Hi Alon,
> 
> This bit is somewhat problematic. If QEMU is maintaining a copy of
> libcacard, then that has to comply with the QEMU way of doing things.
> QEMU cannot rely on various portions in the tree behaving in different
> ways. Otherwise it really should be an external library requirement
> pulled in by the build.
> 
> I am not sure what is the best way, if it stays in QEMU people will
> eventually start making modifications to it, without looking at the
> other copy that is being maintained.
> 

Yeah, I've already decided (actually minutes after sending this email)
to go the route of keeping a copy of qemu-thread* in the external library,
since the api is basically just a mirror of pthreads it was nothing but a
few renames.

> Alternatively the external apps that build against it should be taught
> to link with the QEMU version.
> 

That would require me to teach qemu's configure to build libcacard, possibly
only libcacard (even though qemu doesn't need a lot of packages by itself,
I still wouldn't want apt-get install spice-client to drag in qemu-kvm).

> Cheers,
> Jes