On Tue, 31 Mar 2020, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
On 30/03/20 16:37, Kevin Wolf wrote:
If manually dealing with separate build directories is inconvenient
today, it will still be inconvenient with Meson, so this would mean
introducing the automatic directly creation together with the other
changes to enable Meson. Which is fine by me, as long as it is really
done when the external directory becomes mandatory, so that people won't
have to switch back and forth between directories.
Serious question: why is automatic directly creation more convenient for
developers? Even if "./configure" generates a "build" directory for
you, you would still have to invoke the QEMU binary as
"build/x86_64-softmmu/qemu-system-x86_64". That is less convenient than
doing "mkdir build" in the first place.
I already have to put qemu commands in scripts due to insanely long
options which cannot be conveniently typed so I'd just need to add
automatically created build dir to that script once and be able to
continue using ./configure and make from source dir. This is more
convenient than having to manage the build dir by hand and add it to every
make command as well. If it can be automated then why should I do it?
I can see why it's more convenient for packaging, as they just invoke
"make" and "make install", but as far as developers are concerned it
seems to add complexity for little or no gain.
It's not much complexity and makes life easier for those who do not want
to know about separate build dirs, Meson or the QEMU build system. Just
make sure it builds with usual configure; make; make install and maybe
print a line of text saying you find the build results in whatever dir and
that's it. As long as this works most people will be happy. It you want
people to contribute to QEMU then try to make their life easier not annoy
them unnecesseraily. The way of submitting patches is already difficult
enough to scare away most people, changing to an exotic build system would
also result even less people being able to make any contribution.
Regards,
BALATON Zoltan
