Re: [PATCH v3] mktarball: only archive Xen

[Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

On 04.09.2024 11:59, Andrew Cooper wrote:
> On 19/08/2024 4:10 pm, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> As was basically decided already a while ago, remove - in the simplest
>> possible way - the archiving of both qemu-s and mini-os from tarball
>> generation.
>>
>> With this the subtree-force-update-all prereq isn't needed anymore in
>> the top level Makefile. That goal, including the respective ones
>> underneath tools/, then also are unreferenced and hence are being
>> dropped, too.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>
>> ---
>> This is the simplistic approach; I'm sure this could now be done quite a
>> bit more efficiently. I also expect there's no longer a need to run
>> ./configure ahead of the invocation of this script, but since I have no
>> idea why it was needed earlier on, I'm not removing that here from the
>> doc. IOW all cleanup that's probably better done separately, by someone
>> actually using all of that machinery.
>> ---
>> v3: Drop subtree-force-update-all rules from underneath tools/.
>> v2: Drop subtree-force-update-all prereqs from ./Makefile.
> 
> Removing the archiving is one thing, and we have agreed that's a good
> thing to do.
> 
> However, the makefile rules might be used manually.  While we have the
> other trees cloned in Xen, I'd be wary about dropping the rules.

They're not mentioned in what the help: goal displays, which makes me
worry not overly much here. And Anthony had basically agreed to their
dropping, in part by asking me to drop more than I did initially.

> I guess the real question is how long we expect this interim state to last.

For quite some more time, I suppose, ...

> SeaBIOS and iPXE could disappear right away; there's nothing xen-local
> there at all.
> 
> OVMF doesn't have anything xen-local, but there's a bit of complexity
> setting up a Xen build IIRC.
> 
> Qemu-upstream won't be going anywhere until a) a release of Xen with
> stabilised hypercalls, b) a release of Qemu after that

... seeing for how long we've been talking of stabilized hypercalls.
But how does it matter here for how much longer that situation will
remain? We want release tarballs of just xen.git, and that's what
this patch achieves (plus some cleanup of then-orphan logic). How
else would you propose we reach said goal?

Jan