Re: deprecation of in-tree builds

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Sun, Mar 22, 2020 at 08:14:24PM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
> To be clear, I'm not saying we should pull the rug out
> from anybody. I'm saying:
>  * we should clearly say what our plans are, with a
>    long warning if we can reasonably give longer warning
>  * if there's anything that we would accidentally
>    be breaking with those plans, we should adjust the
>    plans so we don't break things we didn't mean to break
> 
> This doesn't seem controversial to me...

IIUC, all of our CI platofrms are testing out of tree builds. This gives us
confidence that all the important aspects of QEMU build process are operating
as expected. It also means that anyone relying on in-tree builds is already
using a process that is a second-class citizen in terms of supportability.
We've already seen  bit-rot in in-tree builds due to this lack of formal
testing.

If there are things that we discover to be broken with out of tree builds,
this is highlighting gaps in our CI coverage we'll want to address. This
will bring said broken feature into a situation where we have confidence
in its usage going forward.

IOW, I see no downside to deprecating in-tree builds - it is just a
reflection of how we have already considered them to be untested and
undesirable to use.


We still have a few places in docs/  that are illustrating "./configure"
that we should fix too...

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: https://berrange.com      -o-    https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :|
|: https://libvirt.org         -o-            https://fstop138.berrange.com :|
|: https://entangle-photo.org    -o-    https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :|