Re: mdevctl: A shoestring mediated device management and persistence utility

[Cornelia Huck <cohuck@redhat.com>]

On Mon, 1 Jul 2019 08:40:51 -0600
Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@redhat.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 1 Jul 2019 10:20:43 +0200
> Cornelia Huck <cohuck@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 28 Jun 2019 11:05:46 -0600
> > Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@redhat.com> wrote:
> >   
> > > On Fri, 28 Jun 2019 11:06:48 +0200
> > > Cornelia Huck <cohuck@redhat.com> wrote:    
> >   
> > > > What do you think of a way to specify JSON for the attributes directly
> > > > on the command line? Or would it be better to just edit the config
> > > > files directly?      
> > > 
> > > Supplying json on the command like seems difficult, even doing so with
> > > with jq requires escaping quotes.  It's not a very friendly
> > > experience.  Maybe something more like how virsh allows snippets of xml
> > > to be included, we could use jq to validate a json snippet provided
> > > as a file and add it to the attributes... of course if we need to allow
> > > libvirt to modify the json config files directly, the user could do
> > > that as well.  Is there a use case you're thinking of?  Maybe we could
> > > augment the 'list' command to take a --uuid and --dumpjson option and
> > > the 'define' command to accept a --jsonfile.  Maybe the 'start' command
> > > could accept the same, so a transient device could define attributes
> > > w/o excessive command line options.  Thanks,
> > > 
> > > Alex    
> > 
> > I was mostly thinking about complex configurations where writing a JSON
> > config would be simpler than adding a lot of command line options.
> > Something like dumping a JSON file and allowing to refer to a JSON file
> > as you suggested could be useful; but then, those very complex use
> > cases are probably already covered by editing the config file directly.
> > Not sure if it is worth the effort; maybe just leave it as it is for
> > now.  
> 
> Well, I already did it.  It seems useful for creating transient devices
> with attribute specifications.  If it's too ugly we can drop it.

I should probably look at the repository before I reply :)

Anyway, this doesn't look too ugly to me; but I think it would benefit
from some usage examples (which I just sent you a pull request for :)

> Thanks,
> 
> Alex