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

[Markus Armbruster]

"Michael S. Tsirkin" <address@hidden> writes:

> On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 10:01:19PM +0300, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 08:31:08PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> > Il 16/09/2014 18:56, Michael S. Tsirkin ha scritto:
>> > > On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 06:27:51PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> > >> Il 16/09/2014 18:26, Michael S. Tsirkin ha scritto:
>> > >>> Right so types should be explicit.
>> > >>> If an arbitrary string isn't allowed, this should be documented.
>> > >>> It's not great as is: what's the format for macaddr? AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF?
>> > >>> aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff? aabbccddeeff? 0xaabbccddeeff?
>> > >>> But just saying "string" is going in the wrong direction imho.
>> > >>
>> > >> That's the purpose of documentation (docs/qdev-device-use.txt),
>> > > 
>> > > That's not user documentation, that's developer documentation,
>> > > isn't it?
>> > 
>> > It's user documentation.  It's not distributed because we suck at
>> > documentation.
>> > 
>> > >> and even
>> > >> then is better done with examples.  I don't think doing it in -device
>> > >> foo,help (which I'm not even sure is particularly helpful.
>> > > 
>> > > -device foo,help isn't helpful at all because it does not
>> > > tell people what does each option do.
>> > > But it really should be fixed.
>> > 
>> > Exactly.
>> > 
>> > >> I'm sympathetic towards fixing the drive->str change, but I have no idea
>> > >> how to do it.
>> > > 
>> > > 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)
>> > 
>> > that would work for me.
>> 
>> Shouldn't "str" be "string" in HMP?

Probably.

What about QMP?  JSON calls the type "string".  Possible justification
for "str": QMP makes up its own type system, losely based on JSON's,
with its own terminology.

I'm not sure "=T" adds value over the description.  Certainly not in the
example above.

>> Eblake - type is ignored right? Does this mean anything to the right of
>> = is ignored?

As far as I can tell from the libvirt sources: yes.

>> > > We really really should add description to all properties, too.
>> > 
>> > This is a huge job.  We have hundreds of properties.
>> > 
>> > Paolo
>> 
>> Right. If we don't start we won't get there though, will we?
>> 
>
> And, we'll keep adding undocumented ones.

Agree with all three points.

We should get our act together on property documentation.