[libvirt] [PATCH] Invoke PortableXDR's rpcgen if available

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 10:50:30PM +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 04:34:25PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > We discovered over the new year that the XDR code in glibc, which was
> > derived from some original Sun code, doesn't have an unambiguously
> > free license[1].  Furthermore the rpcgen in glibc is unmaintained and
> > produces such bad code that we have to run a Perl script over it in
> > order to correct some egregious errors.  Sun/glibc rpcgen code also
> > contains all sorts of strange micro-optimizations that were probably
> > good back in 1988, but don't make so much sense now.  Also rpcgen was
> > implemented directly in C, so we took this chance to use flex/bison
> > for more accurate and faster parsing.
> > 
> > For these reasons we are rewriting the XDR code and the rpcgen tool
> > with a free license[2].  I'm pleased to say that as a result of this
> > effort we've rewritten rpcgen already:
> > 
> >   http://git.et.redhat.com/?p=portablexdr.git;a=summary
> > 
> > To avoid conflicts, the new rpcgen will be installed as
> > 'portable-rpcgen'.
> > 
> > The attached patch changes libvirt's configure so that if it finds
> > 'portable-rpcgen' on the path, it uses it in preference to 'rpcgen'.
> 
> ACK To the configure.ac bit of the patch.
> 
> >   if (!xdr_u_quad_t (xdrs, &objp->cpu_time))
> >     return FALSE;
> 
> It'd be good to have portable-xdr not generate code with the 'quad' related
> methods, since thy don't exist on Solaris - it has int64 named ones instead.
> Linux should have both I believe.

I'm using xdr_uint64_t (etc) functions from glibc which were
contributed separately and so not under Sun's license.  However, there
will be macros so that either form can be used in the end-user code.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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