Re: A brief look at deprecating our JSON extensions over RFC 8259

["Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 06:47:30PM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On 22/02/21 16:24, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > This problem isn't unique to QEMU. Any app using JSON from the
> > shell will have the tedium of quote escaping. JSON is incredibly
> > widespread and no other apps felt it neccessary to introduce single
> > quoting support, because the benefit doesn't outweigh the interop
> > problem it introduces.
> 
> The quotes were introduced for C code (and especially qtest), not for the
> shell.  We have something like
> 
>     response = qmp("{ 'execute': 'qom-get', 'arguments': { 'path': %s, "
>                    "'property': 'temperature' } }", id);
> 
> These are sent to QEMU as double-quoted strings (the single-quoted JSON is
> parsed to get interpolation and printed back; commit 563890c7c7, "libqtest:
> escape strings in QMP commands, fix leak", 2014-07-01). However, doing the
> interpolation requires a parser that recognizes the single-quoted strings.

IMHO this is the wrong solution to the problem.  Consider the equivalent
libvirt code that uses a standard JSON library underneath and has a high
level API to serialize args into the command

      qemuMonitorJSONMakeCommand("qom-get",
                                 "s:path", id,
				 "s:property", "temperature");

Of course this example is reasonably easy since it is a flat set of
arguments. Nested args get slightly more complicated, but still always
preferrable to doing string interpolation IMHO.

Regards,
Daniel
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