[Libguestfs] [p2v PATCH] build: remove gnulib

[Richard W.M. Jones]

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.)

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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