Re: [PATCH] Update scripts/meson-buildoptions.sh

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 1/3/23 20:31, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> > The other problem with this file is that it appears to
> > be generated differently depending on the host distro
> > (specifically the default value for the --libdir option).
> > That also would seem to nudge towards "don't commit a
> > generated file".

I wasn't aware of the libdir default that Peter mentioned, but the same 
issue would happen for release tarballs so "do not commit it" would have 
to be extended to "do not ship it", that is do everything in Python.

This in turn goes back to the reason for the buildoptions.sh approach: 
the path to the Python binary is not known when "configure --help" 
prints the help message.  If the user does not have a python3 or meson 
binary in the path, requiring "configure --meson=... --help" or 
"configure --python=... --help" is not hideous I guess, but not pretty 
either.

> Paolo: Is the meson-buildoptions.sh approach a temporary solution or
> something long-term? Maybe everything can be migrated to meson
> eventually so that ./configure and meson-buildoptions.sh are no longer
> necessary?

It is long-term.  Meson is only used to build the emulators and that 
part will move entirely out of configure soon, but other parts of the 
build (especially tests/tcg and firmware, which need to build docker 
containers for cross-compilation) are separate and there's no plan to 
use anything but configure/Makefile for the overall orchestration.

While I have noticed stale meson-buildoptions.sh it's never happened to 
me.  I ascribed it to someone not noticing the dirty file rather than a 
bug; it should be possible to add a test to CI that catches it.

Paolo