Howdy,

Lately, the lack of a configuration file is making my life a bit 
painful.  I thought it was time to at least take a shot at it and 
perhaps get the ball rolling.  Here's what I came up with.

The configuration file is INI-style.  I thought since we have so many 
devices, each with their own configuration needs, the structure made 
sense logically.  The first section in the file is implicit so you can 
write a very simple config file without even realizing it's an INI.  It 
also supports python-style interpolation.  This allows you to specify an 
option based on another option.  For instance:

root = /home/anthony
image = %(root)s/disk.img

Would expand to:

root = /home/anthony
image = /home/anthony/disk.img

The 's' is a modifier.  The only other modifier is currently 'b' which 
expands to true or false depending on whether the interpolated value has 
been defined yet.

When QEMU starts up, we read $(PREFIX)/share/qemu-<arch>.conf to get all 
the defaults.  This would include things like memory, devices attached, 
etc.  I'm hoping we can use this as a machine description.  It will also 
check for /etc/qemurc and ~/.qemurc for local defaults.  Finally, you 
can specify an explicit config file with the -config option.

The best way to demonstrate what I'm thinking is with an example.  
Attached is a proof-of-concept that reworks the IDE and SCSI disks to 
use configuration options.  It's mostly backwards compatible.  This is 
only a proof of concept.  Also attached is the global configuration file 
that I'm using.  You'll see that with the exception of backwards 
compatibility, the code has no concept of things like hda, hdb, cdrom, 
sda, sdb, etc.  Instead, it's all done with interpolation.

If people like this approach, I think the best way we could proceed is 
to clean up this code and get it working nicely for the disks.  Then we 
could expand to include other devices over time.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori