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From: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
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Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2015 17:40:08 +0200
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Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 01/17] crypto: add QCryptoSecret object
 class for password/key handling
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To: "Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com>
Cc: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>, Ronnie Sahlberg <ronniesahlberg@gmail.com>, qemu-block@nongnu.org, Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>, qemu-devel@nongnu.org, Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>



On 19/10/2015 17:24, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> JSON doesn't accept arbitrary 8-bit binary data, so the alternative
> 'base64' is effectively providing binary data facility. Having to
> use base64 for plain passwords is rather tedious though, so allowing
> utf8 is a much more developer friendly approach for people using QEMU
> without a mgmt tool like libvirt.
> 
> NB, this dual-format utf8-or-base64 approach matches the approach used
> in QEMU guest agent for the guest-file-read/write commands for the same
> reason.

The difference is that guest-file-read/write have the payload in JSON;
for file-based secrets the payload is not JSON.

So I think that "binary" (which is the default anyway) would fit all the
usecases (direct over JSON, file-based, direct over command line).
Direct over JSON would be limited to valid UTF-8, but that's just a
limitation of the transport.

Paolo