vtest and varnish-cache repo relationship

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

This started as a private conversation, but I think it belongs
on varnish-dev now:

I'm not really sure I know what the "previous plan" was any more, but
I want this sorted out for 8.0.

My conversation with dridi@ yesterday revealed that we may have
misunderstood each other somewhat, as there are two different issues
involving shared libraries.

The first issue, let us call it "vtest+lib" is to make vtest a
package which installs an include, static and/or dynamic libraries,
and a binary which uses the shlib, so that the varnish-cache project,
and possibly haproxy, can link our specific test-binary against the
library of choice.

This only really makes sense if we go the full monty with the vtest
repos:  Publishing releases, making packages, pushing them into
distros etc.  The alternative is a simple source dependency, using
some variant of git submodules or shell-scripts to do the dirty
deed.

The second issue is that vtest uses a lot of stuff copied from
varnish-cache's lib directory.

IMO that is just an annoyance.

To fix it "properly", the vtest repo could pull that stuff out of
the varnish-cache repo, but that would pretty much defeat the entire
reason why we created the vtest repo to begin with.

Alternatively, we could make a third repos containing "varnish-lib"
which then both varnish-cache and vtest repos could depend on, as
well as any other repos which have copied stuff from there over the
years.

There is some good stuff in varnish-cache/lib, but personally I
do not feel it is enough for us to start yet another repository.

If we do create a varnish-lib repos, then the next question again
becomes "package or source dependency".

(I thought what I nixed at some previous occation was the "varnish-lib"
idea, but dridi@ thought it was the "vtest+lib" idea.)

Finally there is an alternative where we do "vtest+lib", let the
vtest repos take over responsibility for the lib stuff and have
varnish-cache repos get it from there.  That would add no further
dependencies, eliminate the duplication of the lib-stuff, and
give any third parties a reasonably sized package to depend on
if they want to use the lib-stuff.

So to me the core question seems to be:  Are we willing/going to
make vtest+lib packages ?

And of course, since HAproxy also uses vtest, it is not something
we alone decide... (Willy cc'ed)

Poul-Henning

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