[Starlingx-discuss] V1 Review Request: Story 29990: libvirt and qemu patch reduction

[Jim Somerville]

Hi Dean and other interested parties,

I've finished reducing the patches on libvirt and qemu.  I was able to 
get rid of virtually all of the RHEL patches, replacing them with just a 
minor "support for running on CentOS" patch or two.  This will make our 
lives a lot easier moving to newer versions.  qemu went from 97 patches 
down to 14, and libvirt from 23 to 13.  The STX patches themselves 
required very little rework, this was mostly a testing exercise in the 
container realm with things changing frequently, making it quite 
challenging.

This passed our regular sanity test run, and we subsequently did a full 
regression test run.  All of the interesting failures in the regression 
run were explainable via existing bug reports.  I feel reasonably 
confident that this isn't going to break anything, but, hey, famous last 
words and all that.

Once you're satisfied with the review, I'll issue pull requests.  Once 
you've pulled and created new branches, I'll follow up with the two 
commits, one referring to the new branches in the manifest, and the 
other with minor changes to the qemu spec file in the stx-integ repo. 
Linked so they both go in together.

One issue concerns me a bit, and that is the tis patch number.  It 
starts counting from the last upstream commit, and with me removing 
patches, it is now lower than it used to be.  If this is a real concern 
I could just add a fixed 100 to the gitrevcount in both qemu and libvirt 
build_data files, guaranteeing package versions will not collide with 
ones in the past.  Your thoughts?

https://github.com/jsomervi/stx-qemu/commits/v3.0.0-patch-reduction-1
https://github.com/jsomervi/stx-libvirt-1/commits/v4.7.0-patch-reduction-1

Thanks,

-Jim