Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] configure: Add missing space when using --with-pkgversion

[Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>]

On 02/15/2018 04:08 AM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:

>>> Hmm - here you're changing who supplies the ().  But that argues that
>>> maybe the callsites should supply " (" and ")" themselves.
>>
>> Yeah, that's likely the saner way to do this. The question is: What
>> about the query-version QMP command? Should it report parentheses or
>> not? I think I'd look nicer if it reports "package": "foo" instead of
>> "package": "(foo)" - but we maybe could break some users who expect
>> parentheses there (no matter whether there is a preceding space or not)?
> 
> The pkgversion is an opaque string - users/apps should never try to
> interpret its contents, because its format can vary arbitrarily between
> distros.  It is merely intended as an informative string to help the
> package maintainer identify which version of QEMU was used when someone
> submits a bug reoprt.
> 
> IOW it is totally valid to change the command to omit '()', and if anything
> breaks that is their own fault for trying to interpret an opaque blob of
> data.

Agreed - the fact that we had a leading space in the QMP output for a 
long time (and even inconsistent at whether it was there), with no one 
noticing, means that dropping the () from QMP won't hurt anyone.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org