regression in meson build, AC_PATH_PROG lost

[Martin Kletzander]

On Fri, Nov 20, 2020 at 01:19:33AM +0100, Pavel Hrdina wrote:
>On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 11:38:28PM +0100, Martin Kletzander wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 10:31:00PM +0100, Olaf Hering wrote:
>> > Am Thu, 19 Nov 2020 22:15:27 +0100
>> > schrieb Martin Kletzander <mkletzan at redhat.com>:
>> >
>> > > Libvirt needs to be able to handle that missing binary at runtime anyway
>> >
>> > It also needs to handle an existing binary. Just how is it supposed to handle it?
>> >
>>
>> Um... run it?
>>
>> > Right now with meson it is either a full path, or just the name in case it was missing at build time (I have not checked if the launcher actually consults $PATH).
>> >
>>
>> Right now, IMHO, all meson checks for binaries that are not needed at build time
>> should be removed.  During runtime we can just use the name of the binary.  I
>> don't know whether it used to be the case that it was thought that there might
>> be security issues with supplying different binary in a directory in $PATH, but
>> frankly, if you have (different-)user-writable directory in $PATH or non-root
>> access to modifying system-wide $PATH then you have bigger problems to deal
>> with.  Even though I do not have anything to back this claim I think that
>> might've been the original reason.
>
>That was my take on the original reasoning as well. I completely agree
>here with Martin and vote for removing these runtime binary checks from
>meson completely. There would be also the benefit for testing purposes
>that you can simply change the path to use your own compiled binary
>without changing anything in libvirt.
>
>I guess we have to have some exceptions like for the QEMU helpers that
>usually lives in /usr/libexec which is not intentionally part of $PATH.
>

Some of them look like they are handled already, but of course we need to make
sure all of them work.  Maybe just prepending/appending /usr/libexec/ to the
list of directories in virFileFindInPath() or a similar method would do, I don't
know.

I'm glad we're on the same canoe =)

>Pavel


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