Re: [PATCH v2 07/11] acpi/tests/bits: add python test that exercizes QEMU bios tables using biosbits

[Ani Sinha]

On Sat, 16 Jul 2022, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 16, 2022 at 12:06:00PM +0530, Ani Sinha wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Jul 15, 2022 at 11:20 Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> >     On Fri, Jul 15, 2022 at 09:47:27AM +0530, Ani Sinha wrote:
> >     > > Instead of all this mess, can't we just spawn e.g. "git clone 
> > --depth
> >     1"?
> >     > > And if the directory exists I would fetch and checkout.
> >     >
> >     > There are two reasons I can think of why I do not like this idea:
> >     >
> >     > (a) a git clone of a whole directory would download all versions of 
> > the
> >     > binary whereas we want only a specific version.
> >
> >     You mention shallow clone yourself, and I used --depth 1 above.
> >
> >     > Downloading a single file
> >     > by shallow cloning or creating a git archive is overkill IMHO when a 
> > wget
> >     > style retrieval works just fine.
> >
> >     However, it does not provide for versioning, tagging etc so you have
> >     to implement your own schema.
> >
> >
> > Hmm I’m not sure if we need all that. Bits has its own versioning mechanism 
> > and
> > I think all we need to do is maintain the same versioning logic and maintain
> > binaries of different  versions. Do we really need the power of git/version
> > control here? Dunno.
>
> Well we need some schema. Given we are not using official bits releases
> I don't think we can reuse theirs.

OK fine. Lets figuire out how to push bits somewhere in git.qemu.org and
the binaries in some other repo first. Everything else hinges on that. We
can fix the rest of the bits later incrementally.

>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >     > (b) we may later move the binary archives to a ftp server or a google
> >     > drive. git/version control mechanisms are not the best place to store
> >     > binary blobs IMHO. In this case also, wget also works.
> >
> >     surely neither ftp nor google drive are reasonable dependencies
> >     for a free software project. But qemu does maintain an http server
> >     already so that't a plus.
> >
> >
> >
> >     I am not insisting on git, but I do not like it that security,
> >     mirroring, caching, versioning all have to be hand rolled and then
> >     figured out by users and maintainers. Who frankly have other things to
> >     do besides learning yet another boutique configuration language.
> >
> >
> > Yeah we do not want to reinvent the wheel all over again. 
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >     And I worry that after a while we come up with a new organization schema
> >     for the files, old ones are moved around and nothing relying on the URL
> >     works.  git is kind of good in that it enforces the idea that history is
> >     immutable.
> >
> >
> > Ah I see your point here.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >     If not vanilla git can we find another utility we can reuse?
> >
> >     git lfs? It seems to be supported by both github and gitlab though
> >     bizarrely github has bandwidth limits on git lfs but apparently not on
> >     vanilla git. Hosting on qemu.org will require maintaining a server
> >     there though.
> >
> >
> >
> >     All that said maybe we should just run with it as it is, just so we get
> >     *something* in the door, and then worry about getting the storage side
> >     straight before making this test a requirement for all acpi developers.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>