From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:37246) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1XTw0A-0006ph-8p for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Tue, 16 Sep 2014 12:53:20 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1XTw04-0007nf-4H for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Tue, 16 Sep 2014 12:53:14 -0400 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:31129) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1XTw03-0007n5-T0 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Tue, 16 Sep 2014 12:53:08 -0400 Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 19:56:18 +0300 From: "Michael S. Tsirkin" Message-ID: <20140916165618.GC8628@redhat.com> References: <54170C7F.8080409@redhat.com> <20140915174503.GB13548@redhat.com> <87wq94xc7v.fsf@blackfin.pond.sub.org> <5417F698.2060001@redhat.com> <87sijsq60x.fsf@blackfin.pond.sub.org> <5418040F.3020106@redhat.com> <20140916103709.GA17910@redhat.com> <541814D7.8040300@redhat.com> <20140916162634.GA2195@redhat.com> <54186507.2070405@redhat.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <54186507.2070405@redhat.com> Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/3] Fix confused output for alias properties List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: Paolo Bonzini Cc: weidong.huang@huawei.com, aliguori@amazon.com, qemu-devel@nongnu.org, agraf@suse.de, Markus Armbruster , arei.gonglei@huawei.com, stefanha@redhat.com, peter.huangpeng@huawei.com, lcapitulino@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