Re: drjones@redhat.com, vkuznets@redhat.com, leiwang@redhat.com, wshi@redhat.com

[George Dunlap <george.dunlap@eu.citrix.com>]

On 04/24/2014 10:32 AM, Ian Campbell wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-04-24 at 10:01 +0100, George Dunlap wrote:
>> On 04/24/2014 09:44 AM, Ian Campbell wrote:
>>> On Thu, 2014-04-24 at 08:14 +0800, Lingfei Kong wrote:
>>>> Maybe another solution is to change the xl command to adapt this.
>>> Feel free to propose a patch but I suspect this would involve too much
>>> surgery to the config file parser.
>>>
>>>>    On
>>>> RHEL5 xen hypervisor, I can create a guest with `xm create hvm.cfg
>>>> cpus="0-3"`. As a user I prefer this method, because this will be
>>>> consistent with it's config file and it is strange to use ' to enclose
>>>> the parameters.
>>> That is perfectly normal shell quoting behaviour, nothing strange about
>>> it IMHO.
>> Well having the config file syntax include quotes and brackets is
>> natural.  The fact that the shell interprets quotes and brackets is also
>> natural.  But the combination of the two leads to a rather unexpected
>> and clunky user interface.
> This happens all the time though, "in find -exec foo \;" in sed and perl
> -e etc etc. It's just the way Unix shells work.

Maybe it would be more clear then, rather than saying "key=value pairs" 
in the man page, to say "a config file snippet"?  That might put people 
in the mindset of thinking more like "perl -e".

>
>> Unfortunately I'm not sure what we can really do at this point to
>> maintain the general flexibility while avoiding backticks.
> Hang on, how did we end up with backticks here? I think you just means
> normal quotes?

Actually I have no idea where that came from... you get the main idea 
though -- escape sequences or single quotes.

  -George