Re: [RFC v2 0/4] flow_compile: textual flow rule compiler

[Stephen Hemminger <stephen@networkplumber.org>]

On Thu, 7 May 2026 09:10:48 +0100
Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com> wrote:

> > 1. API shape.  pcap_compile-style (one string -> opaque object ->
> >    arrays) versus the three-call attr/pattern/actions form
> >    Sismis's v12 exposes.  What does your application actually
> >    want?
> >   
> 
> For this, I wonder if we also could do with a second API for the creation
> which takes a list of tokens rather than just a single string. Thinking
> about integration with testpmd, or with apps which already have some
> commandline interface which produces a list of tokens, having to re-stitch
> the tokens together into one string seems awkward.
> 
> Also, have you already investigated how this might be integrated into
> testpmd? Do we have the capability to pass multi-token strings via cmdline?

Lex pass does tokenizing in a way that is different than simple string split.
Could have a wrapper that takes list of tokens and quotes them back to
a string.

For testpmd integration.
 - the new compiler may intentionally diverge from existing adhoc
   parsing. The AI code generation already flagged a couple of these
   and put note in documentation.

 - testpmd (and probably cmdline) will need ability to not pass unparsed
   string, may need new cmdline type for "rest of line as string"

 - AI proposed new syntax:
    flow compile <port> "quote rule"