Re: [PATCH] autogen.sh: Restore --no-git (avoid git submodule update)

On Wed, Jun 03, 2020 at 12:31:09PM +0200, Pavel Hrdina wrote: > On Tue, Jun 02, 2020 at 04:47:45PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote: > > Prior to 2621d48f005a "gnulib: delete all gnulib integration", > > one could pass ./autogen.sh --no-git to prevent the libvirt build > > system from running git submodule update. > > > > This feature is needed by systems like the Xen Project CI which want > > to explicitly control the revisions of every tree. These will > > typically arrange to initialise the submodules check out the right > > version of everything, and then expect the build system not to mess > > with it any more. > > To be honest I don't understand why would anyone want to keep track of > all submodules of all projects for any CI and update it manually every > time the upstream project changes these submodules. Sounds like a lot > of unnecessary work but maybe I'm missing something. Two possible scenarios that I think are valid - The CI job script does not have network access - The CI job script sees the source dir as read-only In both cases the CI harness would have to initialize the submodule before runing the CI job. I don't know if this is what Xen CI is hitting, but I think the request is reasonable none the less. Both Jenkins and GitLab CI have option to make the harness init submodules prior to the job running.

> > Despite to the old documentation comments referring only to gnulib, > > the --no-git feature is required not only because of gnulib but also > > because of the other submodule, src/keycodemapdb. > > > > (And in any case, even if it were no longer required because all the > > submodules were removed, it ought ideally to have been retained as a > > no-op for compaibility reasons.) > > Well, we will break a lot more by switching to Meson build system where > everyone building libvirt will have to change their scripts as it will > not be compatible at all. Yes, but I think that's tangential, as the two above reasons will still apply, and Meson will cope with having submodules pre-initialized.