bug#26797: qemu looks for smbd at /usr/sbin

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Marius Bakke <mbakke@fastmail.com> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> skribis:
>>
>>> Qemu comes with support for sharing files with a guest via Samba.  This
>>> is done by appending something like this to the qemu-system-*
>>> invocation:
>>>
>>>     … -net user,smb=$HOME/Downloads -net nic
>>>
>>> Qemu needs to be told *at configure time* where the smbd executable will
>>> be at runtime.  By default this is /usr/sbin/smbd.  Users can work
>>> around this problem by installing the “samba” package and creating a
>>> link from /usr/sbin/smbd to the actual executable.
>>>
>>> It would be better to fix this, but this would require adding samba as a
>>> dependency to Qemu, so that the location can be set at configure time.
>>> Alternatively, we could patch Qemu to look for smbd depending on an
>>> environment variable.
>>
>> See commit b344c505f4dff2ecbe981f0a0a3c3d67b222dcca, which removed the
>> dependency and Samba.  Prior to that commit, QEMU recorded the absolute
>> file name of ‘smbd’.
>>
>> The problem is that Samba is big:
>>
>> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
>> $ guix size qemu |tail -1
>> total: 710.5 MiB
>> $ guix size qemu samba |tail -1
>> total: 1203.5 MiB
>> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>>
>> Thus it’d be best if we modified QEMU to search for ‘smbd’ in $PATH.
>
> Tangentially, would it make sense to add a "qemu-full" package? I'd like
> to add RBD support when Ceph is stable on Hydra, but that adds another
> ~300MiB to the closure (and a very expensive dependency..).

The day after someone will suggest adding “qemu-fuller”.  ;-)

Seriously yes, why not; just wondering whether it should be called
“qemu-ceph-enabled” or something along these lines.

Ludo’.