From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1JGKxS-0008Dw-Sp for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Sat, 19 Jan 2008 16:10:30 -0500 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1JGKxR-0008Bm-7G for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Sat, 19 Jan 2008 16:10:30 -0500 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1JGKxR-0008BZ-2y for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Sat, 19 Jan 2008 16:10:29 -0500 Received: from mail.codesourcery.com ([65.74.133.4]) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS-1.0:DHE_RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1JGKxQ-0007DJ-B1 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Sat, 19 Jan 2008 16:10:28 -0500 From: Paul Brook Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Allow default network type to be determined from an environmental variable Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2008 21:10:09 +0000 References: <478A80B8.7070708@us.ibm.com> In-Reply-To: <478A80B8.7070708@us.ibm.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200801192110.11295.paul@codesourcery.com> Reply-To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org List-Id: qemu-devel.nongnu.org List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org Cc: Anthony Liguori > 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. 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