[Spice-devel] autoconf for slirp

[Yonit Halperin]

On 03/28/2010 02:30 PM, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-03-28 at 09:03 +0300, Yonit Halperin wrote:
>> On 03/26/2010 11:45 AM, Alexander Larsson wrote:
>>> On Fri, 2010-03-26 at 10:25 +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
>>>> this is quick and dirty, and not completely tested yet, but it
>> makes
>>>> my life a little bit easier, since I
>>>> don't install stuff in /usr ever.
>>>
>>> I took this, cleaned it up and made it pass distcheck and commited.
>>>
>>> However, whats the general deal with us maintaining a copy of the
>> slirp
>>> code from qemu? That code is in turn a cut and paste from an already
>>> existing (autoconf-using) upstream library at:
>>>
>>>     http://slirp.sourceforge.net/
>>>
>>> Why are we not using that? And if we have good reasons, why don't we
>>> call our copy something that does not conflict with the original
>>> package?
>>>
>>
>> It is not the same as the upstream code. The main change: the original
>>
>> code transfers the application layer of the packets to its destination
>>
>> by using BSD sockets. We changed it to use a general interface for
>> socket, so we can use it to pass the packets to spice (tunnel
>> channel).
>> No problem to change the name of the package...
>
> How extensive is the changes? Could they be made such that its just a
> patch to the upstream version, supporting both BSD sockets and a generic
> interface?
>


http://slirp.sourceforge.net/ wasn't updated since 2006.
The changes are not minor and they also contain additions/fixes that 
were preformed in Qemu. If in the future we decide that the network 
redirection solution is part of spice, we should discuss how to handle 
the Slirp issue and we can try to revive this project, though its 
original aim is different than ours. For now, since network redirection 
is not a top priority feature, we can insert ifdefs to the tunnel 
worker, remove for now the dependency on slirp, till we continue with 
this feature.

Yonit.