Re: [Qemu-devel] [RESEND][PATCH v3] Generalize -machine command line option

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

On 07/25/2011 05:59 AM, Jan Kiszka wrote:
> On 2011-07-25 12:45, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>> That's an excuse, not a practical solution.  We have to be able to
>> work with any qemu.  eg. the qemu in current Fedora Rawhide which
>> supports only -machine accel=, or qemu in other distros which are also
>> branched from arbitrary git releases, or qemu that people compile
>> themselves.
>
> In principle, this is first of all a Rawhide problem. Upstream really
> can't babysit every distro doing crazy things with arbitrary devel
> snapshots. These patches were public, and the maintainers had a fair
> chance to realize that the interface was not yet set in stone.
>
>>
>> Parsing -help output and guesswork isn't scalable, and this is not
>> exactly the first time that people have complained about this.
>
> I agree. That's why we try hard to release stable interfaces and then
> maintain them.
>
>>
>> (Yes, libvirt and libguestfs do allow callers to mechanically query
>> their respective APIs for capabilities.)
>
> Maybe Anthony's (Liguori) rework of the QEMU config interfaces will
> provide a better reflections, haven't checked. But for now you need to
> stick with this model, specifically when you want to maintain all the
> distro forks.

Yes, it will, but it doesn't fix this particular.  Problem.  Until we do 
a release, we reserve the right to change the syntax of newly introduced 
command line options.

I don't think any level of introspection changes this.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

>
> Jan
>