[Libguestfs] Continuing the split (was: Let's split up the libguestfs git repo and tarballs)

[Pino Toscano]

On Friday, 29 November 2019 13:09:47 CET Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> So, the difficulty of git submodules aside, we have now split off
> virt-v2v and virt-p2v into separate projects.
> 
> I also yesterday split off the boot analysis tools into a repo which
> is likely to be rarely used and which I'll probably not bother to
> package in Fedora.
> https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs-analysis-tools
> 
> Where do we go from here?

Before going on with splitting, I'd take a "pause" to review the status
of the projects, after their split. Considering the work that was
already done to split them, and various difficulties we faced, there is
enough material to check what still need to be improved/fixed, as most
probably the same issues will happen in case of further splits.

The biggest issue I see so far is the impossibility to build virt-v2v
(the only split project that requires libguestfs) with an uninstalled
version of libguestfs. I see (at least) two problems.

1) building C programs.
Usually this means having a .pc file for pkg-config in PKG_CONFIG_PATH,
with headers and library in the location of that file.  An approach
I've seen done is to create a -uninstalled.pc file with its paths
pointing to the source/build directories, and making sure the path of
that -uninstalled.pc file is in PKG_CONFIG_PATH (which ./run can do).
I never tried to do this, I can give it a try on Monday to see how it
works.

2) building OCaml programs.
It seems like ocamlfind.findlib has the possibility to locate modules
in non-standard directories (see findlib.conf(5)), however I never
tried that.  Most probably a certain file structure is expected, which
is definitely not what we have right now.

IMHO solving (1) is definitely a must, otherwise there is no way to
test new APIs outside of the repository with libguestfs (the library).
Possibly also (2) is a must -- for example, earlier I added to the OCaml
binding this:
https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/commit/4aa4edf972bc8df8869cdcaa4ab4f40b63a626cf
the idea is to use it in virt-v2v (not for an important change anyway),
however right now it is not possible.

Thanks,
-- 
Pino Toscano
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