Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/3] Fix confused output for alias properties

[Markus Armbruster]

Eric Blake <address@hidden> writes:

> On 09/16/2014 12:31 PM, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>
>>> Change legacy_name to point to a detailed human-readable
>>> description of the type?
>>> E.g. "Ethernet 6-byte MAC Address, format: AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF"?
>> 
>> If libvirt can cope with
>> 
>> e1000.mac=str (Ethernet 6-byte MAC Address, format: AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF)
>
> Isn't this output only available under -help? Libvirt only cares about
> QMP listings of devices and their properties, so improving the human
> interface should have no negative impact to the machine interface.

Libvirt still has code parsing this, see virQEMUCapsExtractDeviceStr().
Whether it's actually used with recent QEMU I don't know.

-device FOO,help merely formats qmp_device_list_properties()'s value for
human consumption.  So, to make a description string available for help,
we also have to put it into the function's value.  If we don't want it
in QMP, we need to filter it out in the command handler.  Right now,
qmp_device_list_properties() *is* the command handler.

Aside: why isn't the QMP command named query-device-list-properties?  We
suck at consistency!