Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Allow default network type to be determined from an environmental variable

[Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>]

Paul Brook wrote:
>> In the absence of a global configuration file, a reasonably sane way to
>> support this configuration system wide is to use an environmental
>> variable.  QEMU already uses a number of global variables for
>> configuring audio options.
>>     
>
> I'd really prefer we didn't do this, and preferably obsoleted/removed the 
> existing environment variables.  IMHO using environment variables is a really 
> bad idea and should be avoided wherever possible.
>   

Any suggestion on an alternative mechanism then?  Can we introduce a 
config file and slowly introduce options into it?

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> Environment variables are about the worst user interface I can think of. For a 
> start they're a global resource, which is limited on some systems.
> It's also extremely hard to determine what environment a user is running. This 
> makes reproducing user bugs somewhere between hard and impossible.
>
> Paul
>