How important are separately buildable binary blobs? Rather than speak in terms of app/foo and app/bar, I'll just come out and say its app-emulation/qemu. Due to the nature of the package it relies on firmware blobs to emulate certain aspects of the system (e.g. BIOS). I've been working on making each of the binary blobs buildable and adding them to the tree e.g. sys-firmware/ipxe, sys-firmware/seabios, sys-firmware/sgabios, sys-firmware/vgabios. Unfortunately QEMU upstream keeps their own repos of the various components and for each release builds their own and commits it within their repo. They ship with these pre-built blobs and that is what they install by default. The result is from the true package upstreams there often is not a release that works with QEMU. For example, QEMU 1.3.0 requires a git revision of SeaBIOS.
So basically, how important is it to keep supporting these separately buildable blobs knowing that it might slow the release of QEMU within our own tree. -- Doug Goldstein
