[libvirt PATCH 00/17] drop meson checks for runtime binaries

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 02:50:13PM +0200, Michal Privoznik wrote:
> On 4/19/21 2:24 PM, Neal Gompa wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 3:13 PM Pavel Hrdina <phrdina at redhat.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > 
> > 
> > I don't think this is a good "cleanup" to do. Having these checks is
> > useful since without them, we'd blindly build modules that possibly
> > wouldn't work because we haven't verified that those dependencies
> > exist. People do install from source into runtime (I don't, but people
> > do), and it's useful for making sure all the necessary dependencies
> > are captured for runtime use at build-time for package builds (I've
> > caught mistakes because of these).
> 
> To be fair though, some cleanups Pavel did are worth merging (e.g. couple of
> first patches that fix comments or remove unused functions) regardless of
> ...
> 
> > 
> > So I NACK the whole series.
> > 
> > 
> 
> this NACK. What I am worried about is that usually, when a distro builds
> libvirt package a path to a runtime binary will be recorded (e.g. DNSMASQ
> will be expanded to /usr/sbin/dnsmasq and compiled in). This way, we will
> try to find "dnsmasq" in PATH, which may work for qemu:///system, but may
> lead to unexpected results for qemu:///session because for instance I
> override PATH for my regular user so that a directory with my helper scripts
> comes first. Let's hope that I won't pick wrong name for my scripts.

I think that's actually the desirable situation for libvirtd running
as non-root. If the user overrides a system binary with an alternate
impl, it is right that we honour that.

I think we ought to consider two parts to this series - honouring $PATH,
and probing at meson time. We can have the former, without changing
the latter, so we still get feature auto-detection at build time to
avoid uncessarily building stuff that's not appropriate for the OS
in question.

Regards,
Daniel
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