Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v3] Support 'help' as a synonym for '?' in command line options

[Markus Armbruster]

Peter Maydell <address@hidden> writes:

> For command line options which permit '?' meaning 'please list the
> permitted values', add support for 'help' as a synonym, by abstracting
> the check out into a helper function.
>
> This change means that in some cases where we were being lazy in
> our string parsing, "?junk" will now be rejected as an invalid option
> rather than being (undocumentedly) treated the same way as "?".
>
> Update the documentation to use 'help' rather than '?', since '?'
> is a shell metacharacter and thus prone to fail confusingly if there
> is a single character filename in the current working directory and
> the '?' has not been escaped. It's therefore better to steer users
> towards 'help', though '?' is retained for backwards compatibility.
>
> We do not, however, update the output of the system emulator's -help
> (or any documentation autogenerated from the qemu-options.hx which
> is the source of the -help text) because libvirt parses our -help
> output and will break. At a later date when QEMU provides a better
> interface so libvirt can avoid having to do this, we can update the
> -help text too.
>
> Signed-off-by: Peter Maydell <address@hidden>

qdev properties named help won't work because they get interpreted as
"-device FOO,help".  No such properties exist now.  Tolerable.

Reviewed-by: Markus Armbruster <address@hidden>