Re: [libvirt] [PATCH] Invoke PortableXDR's rpcgen if available

We discovered over the new year that the XDR code in glibc, which was derived from some original Sun code, doesn't have an unambiguously free license[1]. Furthermore the rpcgen in glibc is unmaintained and produces such bad code that we have to run a Perl script over it in order to correct some egregious errors. Sun/glibc rpcgen code also contains all sorts of strange micro-optimizations that were probably good back in 1988, but don't make so much sense now. Also rpcgen was implemented directly in C, so we took this chance to use flex/bison for more accurate and faster parsing. For these reasons we are rewriting the XDR code and the rpcgen tool with a free license[2]. I'm pleased to say that as a result of this effort we've rewritten rpcgen already: http://git.et.redhat.com/?p=portablexdr.git;a=summary To avoid conflicts, the new rpcgen will be installed as 'portable-rpcgen'. The attached patch changes libvirt's configure so that if it finds 'portable-rpcgen' on the path, it uses it in preference to 'rpcgen'.

if (!xdr_u_quad_t (xdrs, &objp->cpu_time)) return FALSE;