Re: [RFC] QEMU as Xcode project on macOS

[Christian Schoenebeck]

On Mittwoch, 9. September 2020 20:13:55 CEST Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > On Mittwoch, 9. September 2020 15:40:05 CEST Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > > Ideally any xcode setup would just invoke whatever our standard
> > > build tools are IMHO, so it has zero possibility of introducing
> > > new build problems.
> > 
> > Then you would not win anything on Mac. The problematic on macOS is that
> > Apple froze many standard FOSS tools that switched to GPL3. So by default
> > you just have e.g. GNU make 3.81 (2006), Bash 3.2.57 (2007), ...  unless
> > you start to manually install them (e.g. from Homebrew & Co). And being
> > forced to use Meson on Mac with all its Python dependencies does not make
> > it easier.
> 
> It is going to need to use homebrew (or an equivalent) to bring in various
> 3rd party libraries QEMU depends on at build time, not least glib.

External libraries are not the problem. AFAICS that's just libffi, glib and 
pixman. These could be added as submodules.

The more relevant ones would be the build tools that those QEMU scripts are 
running to auto generate source files.

> So avoiding homebrew for the build system doesn't appear like an obvious win
> to me.

I would see several benefits:

1. High potential of attracting much more devs on macOS if it's just click and 
   run.

2. Increased quality on Mac due to more devs.

3. Being able to delegate QEMU related macOS bugs to Apple.

4. *Much* more efficient work-flow when developing with the Xcode IDE
   (-> both increased development speed & quality).

On Mittwoch, 9. September 2020 19:45:04 CEST Liviu Ionescu wrote:
> FYI, I'm working on a cross-platform standalone meson package, a .tar.gz
> that you can install in any location and includes the python run-time.
> 
> I already have the build scripts functional for Windows (which is generally
> the most difficult platform); the build scripts for Linux/macOS will follow
> soon.
> 
> https://github.com/xpack-dev-tools/meson-build-xpack/blob/xpack-develop/scri
> pts/common-apps-functions-source.sh

Interesting! That would defuse the homebrew problematic. However you would 
still be opted out from (4.) all those Xcode IDE features that make 
development such efficient.

Best regards,
Christian Schoenebeck