Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/3] Fix confused output for alias properties

["Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com>]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 06:27:51PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> Il 16/09/2014 18:26, Michael S. Tsirkin ha scritto:
> > Right so types should be explicit.
> > If an arbitrary string isn't allowed, this should be documented.
> > It's not great as is: what's the format for macaddr? AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF?
> > aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff? aabbccddeeff? 0xaabbccddeeff?
> > But just saying "string" is going in the wrong direction imho.
> 
> That's the purpose of documentation (docs/qdev-device-use.txt),

That's not user documentation, that's developer documentation,
isn't it?

> and even
> then is better done with examples.  I don't think doing it in -device
> foo,help (which I'm not even sure is particularly helpful.

-device foo,help isn't helpful at all because it does not
tell people what does each option do.
But it really should be fixed.

> "ip link help" doesn't document the format of a MAC address, either.

Networking on linux is notoriously hard to configure.
Hence the rise of wrapper tools such as network manager
to hide all the details from users.

> I'm sympathetic towards fixing the drive->str change, but I have no idea
> how to do it.
> 
> Paolo

Change legacy_name to point to a detailed human-readable
description of the type?
E.g. "Ethernet 6-byte MAC Address, format: AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF"?

We really really should add description to all properties, too.

-- 
MST