From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1JOkAo-0006Ro-3u for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:43:02 -0500 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1JOkAm-0006RB-O7 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:43:01 -0500 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1JOkAm-0006Qz-Fy for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:43:00 -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 1JOkAl-00048n-SD for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:43:00 -0500 From: Paul Brook Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Allow default network type to be determined from an environmental variable Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2008 01:42:46 +0000 References: <478A80B8.7070708@us.ibm.com> <200801192110.11295.paul@codesourcery.com> <200802111817.31058.rob@landley.net> In-Reply-To: <200802111817.31058.rob@landley.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200802120142.48235.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: Rob Landley Cc: Anthony Liguori , qemu-devel@nongnu.org On Tuesday 12 February 2008, Rob Landley wrote: > On Saturday 19 January 2008 15:10:09 Paul Brook wrote: > > > 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. > > On Windows, you mean? Windows is a particularly bad example, yes. > > It's also extremely hard to determine what environment a user is running. > > Type "set" with no arguments. (I admit bash 3.x throws insane amounts of > crap into this by default, but any program that's exposed to the FSF for an > extended period of time bloats beyond recognition.) > > The sane way to do this is prefix all the environment variables QEMU uses > with QEMU_ so you can go > > set | grep QEMU > > And see just what you're interested in. > > Would that make this approach more palatable? No. Paul