[Libguestfs] 1.39 proposal: Let's split up the libguestfs git repo and tarballs

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Fri, Feb 09, 2018 at 01:07:13PM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 02/09/2018 12:01 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> >My contention is that the libguestfs git repository is too large and
> >unwieldy.  There are too many separate, unrelated projects and as a
> >result of that the source has too many dependencies and takes too long
> >to build and test.
> >
> >The project divides (sort of) naturally into layers -- the library,
> >the bindings, the various virt tools -- and could be split along those
> >lines into separate projects which can then be released and evolve at
> >their own pace.
> 
> Sounds reasonable to me as an observer.  Would you also create a
> meta-package that has all the other projects as submodules, and
> which gets a new commit any time any one of the submodules does a
> release, to still make it easy for someone who wants to grab
> everything that the old monolithic repo used to provide?

I guess we could although it has a danger of getting out of date if no
one works on it.

> >* common code and generator: Off to the side we'd somehow need to
> >   package up the common code and the generator for use by all of the
> >   above projects.  It wouldn't be a separate project for downstream
> >   packagers, but instead the code would be included (ie. duplicated)
> >   in tarballs and upstream available as a side git repo that you'd
> >   need to include when building (git submodule?).  This is somewhat
> >   unspecified.
> 
> git submodules are a pain to work with sometimes, but they do sound
> like the best approach for what you are documenting here.  Dan
> Berrange's work on making keycodemapdb a submodule to multiple
> projects may prove to be a useful inspiration in the process.

I'm not a fan of submodules either, but in this one case I do think
they would work.  It's still an open question how this would translate
to tarballs which realistically need to be self-contained.

Rich.

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