Re: Making QEMU easier for management tools and applications

[Eric Blake]

On 1/28/20 6:54 AM, Kevin Wolf wrote:

> > The arguments as dotted keys:
> >
> >      id=bar,backend.type=file,backend.data.out=/tmp/bar.log
> >
> > Observe there's quite some of nesting.  While that's somewhat cumbersome
> > in JSON, it's a lot worse with dotted keys, because there nesting means
> > repeated key prefixes.  I could give much worse examples, actually.
>
> This is true, but even without the repeated keys (e.g. in a syntax that
> would use brackets), it would still be unnecessarily verbose and
> probably hard to remember:
>
>      id=bar,backend={type=file,data={out=/tmp/bar.log}}

With shells like bash, that would need quoting to avoid unintended brace 
expansions.  It is not the end of the world to require shell quoting 
(and passing JSON on the command line definitely needs it), but a syntax 
that avoids shell quoting is marginally easier to type and reason about.

--
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3226
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org