Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v1 00/23] QAPI Infrastructure Round 1

[Luiz Capitulino <lcapitulino@redhat.com>]

On Tue, 17 May 2011 19:51:47 -0500
Michael Roth <mdroth@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:

> These apply on top of master, and can also be obtained from:
> git://repo.or.cz/qemu/mdroth.git qapi_round1_v1

Nice to see this moving forward.

> These patches are a backport of some of the QAPI-related work from Anthony's
> glib tree. The main goal is to get the basic code generation infrastructure in
> place so that it can be used by the guest agent to implement a QMP-like guest
> interface, and so that future work regarding the QMP conversion to QAPI can be
> decoupled from the infrastructure bits.
> 
> Round1 incorporates the following components from Anthony's tree:
> 
>  - Pulls in GLib libraries (core GLib, GThreads, and GIO)
> 
>  - Adds code to do exception-like error propagation
> 
>  - New error reporting functions
> 
>  - Schema-based code generation for QAPI types and synchronous QMP commands
>    using visiter patterns to cut reduce the amount of code generated by the
>    previous scripts. This is just infrastructure, QMP will remain untouched
>    until the actual conversion efforts are underway. Only a set of unit tests
>    and, in the guest, virtagent, will utilize this infrastructure initially.

This series introduces quite a lot of infrastructure w/o adding a single real
user. This has some disadvantages, the most important one being that we can't
test it for real (unit-tests are important, but don't replace real usage).
Another disadvantage is that, reviewers don't actually see how this is going to
be used and can't comment on API level improvements/bugs.

I prefer an incremental approach. We could try to split this series in smaller
parts and change current QMP to use that parts. This will make review easier
and will make it possible to do incremental testing too.