Re: [RFC] Plan to delete ShellBinPkg from edk2/master

[Laszlo Ersek <lersek@redhat.com>]

On 04/02/19 13:29, Ryszard Knop wrote:
> On Tue, 2019-04-02 at 10:12 +0100, Leif Lindholm wrote:
>> Hi Laszlo,
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 02, 2019 at 10:49:16AM +0200, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
>>> On 04/02/19 07:38, Bi, Dandan wrote:
>>>> Hi All,
>>>>
>>>> ShellBinPkg is the remaining binary package in Edk2 repo.  We
>>>> plan
>>>> to delete ShellBinPkg from edk2/master, and keep source ShellPkg
>>>> only in edk2 repo.
>>>> Before the deletion, I will update the existing consumers in Edk2
>>>> and Edk2Platforms to use ShellPkg directly.
>>>>
>>>> If you have any concern please raise here before mid-April . If
>>>> there is no concern, I will create patches for this task after
>>>> mid-April.
>>>>
>>>> Bugzilla for this task:
>>>> https://bugzilla.tianocore.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1675
>>>
>>> (adding a few CC's)
>>>
>>> I think we should not remove ShellBinPkg without a replacement
>>> *somehwere*.
>>>
>>> A shell binary that is built from a validated edk2 tree, with a set
>>> of
>>> library resolutions and PCD settings that are known to keep
>>> platform
>>> dependencies *out* of the shell binary, is extremely useful.
>>
>> Agreed. However, I am not sure that accurately describes what we have
>> today.
>>
>>> IIRC, Andrew suggested earlier that we should treat the shell even
>>> as an
>>> "OS", with better compatibility standards than we currently
>>> maintain.
>>>
>>> I think we should only remove ShellBinPkg if we permanently offer a
>>> separate download location instead, and we rebuild the shell binary
>>> from
>>> "ShellPkg/ShellPkg.dsc" at every stable tag.
>>
>> I think this sounds like an exellent improvement. When I saw the
>> patch, I did immediately think maybe I should start including them in
>> my Linaro releases. But if we could automate a build of binaries for
>> all supported architectures, and have a place to publish them, that
>> would be much better.
> 
> One place to put them might be next to the stable releases on GitHub.
> Sources are automatically packaged there, binaries can also be
> uploaded, also automatically via CI. (Maybe it could also be used to
> keep stable OVMF images? Would be nice for quick testing for people not
> involved in UEFI development and not having these binaries available in
> their OS repos, or having issues with 3rd party builds.)

OVMF and ArmVirtQemu binaries are being bundled with upstream QEMU. The
series should be merged into QEMU 4.1.

The plan is to refresh the firmware binaries for each edk2 stable tag.

(It's also possible that users could benefit from synching QEMU and edk2
releases to an extent, similarly to how SeaBIOS and QEMU tend to be in
sync. (IIRC SeaBIOS tends to cut a new release shortly before QEMU, so
that QEMU can pick up the most recent release while it's fresh.) Anyway
this sub-topic is for the future.)

Thanks
Laszlo