Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] QMP: allow JSON dict arguments in qmp-shell

[Fam Zheng]

On Tue, 02/11 09:43, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> Fam Zheng <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > On Wed, 01/29 12:17, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> >> qmp-shell hides the QMP wire protocol JSON encoding from the user.  Most
> >> of the time this is helpful and makes the command-line human-friendly.
> >> 
> >> Some QMP commands take a dict as an argument.  In order to express this
> >> we need to revert back to JSON notation.
> >> 
> >> This patch allows JSON dict arguments in qmp-shell so commands like
> >> blockdev-add and nbd-server-start can be invoked:
> >> 
> >>   (QEMU) blockdev-add options={"driver":"file","id":"drive1",...}
> >> 
> >> Note that spaces are not allowed since str.split() is used to break up
> >> the command-line arguments first.
> >> 
> >> Signed-off-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <address@hidden>
> >> ---
> >
> > While this is definitely useful, just wondering if it is more friendly to 
> > allow
> > passing options as command line options do:
> >
> >     (QEMU) blockdev-add options.driver=file options.id=drive1
> 
> Yeah.  The "spaces are not allowed" syntax is pretty horrid :)

It's not hard to loose the space restriction by making qmp-shell smarter to
match "}" with "{", but the quote marks and colons are still troublesome.

Maybe I'll think differently when many levels of nesting becomes common. :)

Fam