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

["Laszlo Ersek" <lersek@redhat.com>]

On 04/04/19 17:10, Andrew Fish wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Apr 4, 2019, at 3:45 AM, Laszlo Ersek <lersek@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 04/04/19 06:09, Andrew Fish wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Apr 3, 2019, at 8:42 PM, Ni, Ray <ray.ni@intel.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Mike, Laszlo,
>>>> It's a good idea to store the shell binaries into the assets of each stable tag.
>>>>
>>>> If we go in this way, it means "build" requires network connection to download the
>>>> shell binary from the assets of a certain release.
>>>> Do you think it's acceptable?
>>>>
>>>
>>> Ray,
>>>
>>> The other option would be to have a configuration step, like installing Python or the C compilers, that copies the binary. You need a network connection to clone the git repo and to stay in sync with it. I guess you could model that as a git submodule, or actually have a script that grabs the binary you want from a remote system, and fall back to the local copy if you don't have a network connection. 
>>>
>>>
>>>> Or we can separate the binary download and build into two phases so build phase
>>>> can be independent on network connection.
>>>>
>>>> Is there any known practice/solution for such requirement (stable sub-component binaries
>>>> needed by a production image generation)?
>>>>
>>>
>>> I think to some extent this kind of thing is driven by the customers build rules. Basically what the customer think of as their manifest of parts for software version X.
>>
>> I suggested PREBUILD because I took it as a given, from Mike's problem
>> statement, that "build" had to ensure, internally, the local
>> availability of the shell binary.
>>
>> If that's a not requirement, then IMO it's much better to leave it to
>> organizations to fetch the prerequisites of their platform builds. I'd
>> say that's out of scope for upstream edk2 -- if they need the shell
>> binary to be available off-line, at their build time, they can download
>> it earlier and cache it locally.
>>
> 
> Laszlo,
> 
> I guess for edk2 projects the maintainers own the manifest. So the edk2 projects that need the Shell should define how that works. I don't think we need to define a generic solution for 3rd parties as I'd guess Red Hat and Microsoft probably already have tools and strategies to deal with cobbling together software from different packages.  
> 
> So I guess we should ask the maintainers of the ekd2 packages does the version of the Shell matter? If no then just pre-install a shell binary as part of the setup. If the version matters then we should look into doing something a little more fancy, and use the pre-installed shell binary as the fallback. 
> 
> Is there anyway to tell the Shell version from the Shell PE/COFF? One option could be a build warning if the shell is old and just have the user manually update the shell if needed. 

As a co-maintainer under OvmfPkg and ArmVirtPkg, I prefer to build the
shell from source at all times, namely from the source code that is part
of the entire edk2 tree at a given commit / checkout.

I don't see any possibility or desire for the virtual firmware packages
(RPMs) that I have a say in to consume/ship a pre-built UEFI shell binary.

--*--

The reason I recommend for us (the TianoCore community) to offer the
shell as a prebuilt binary too, somewhere on the web, is because it
would help UEFI users (in the most general sense).

Thanks,
Laszlo