Re: [Question] What is the definition of “private” fields in QOM?

[Zhao Liu <zhao1.liu@intel.com>]

Hi Peter,

On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 10:25:07AM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
> Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2024 10:25:07 +0100
> From: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
> Subject: Re: [Question] What is the definition of “private” fields in
>  QOM?
> 
> On Sat, 19 Oct 2024 at 16:54, Zhao Liu <zhao1.liu@intel.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi maintainers and list,
> >
> > In the QOM structure, the class and object structs have two members:
> > parent_class and parent_obj, which are often marked as "< private >" in
> > the comment.
> >
> > I couldn’t find information on why to define ‘private’ and ‘public’,
> > even in the earliest QOM commits and the patch emails I could find.
> 
> This is a rather old thing which I think was originally
> borrowed from glib's commenting convention.
> 
> I'm fairly sure that we decided a while back that they were entirely
> unnecessary, so you don't need to add them in new code. (I can't
> actually find anything with a quick list search about that though
> so maybe I'm misremembering.)

Thanks for your explanation! So I understand that directly accessing
parent_obj/parent_class is actually allowed.

> Either way, there's still a lot of them floating around in the codebase
> that were added before we made that decision.

Yes, then I understand that <private> and <public> are historical
burdens that can also be cleaned up.

Thanks,
Zhao