[Libguestfs] RFC: arbitrary parameters for add_drive

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Dec 03, 2015 at 03:32:42PM +0100, Pino Toscano wrote:
> On Thursday 03 December 2015 11:52:14 Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 02, 2015 at 02:10:52PM +0100, Pino Toscano wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > one of the bugs we have (#1092583) is about the lack of query string
> > > for http/https URLs: there were patches about that (not merged yet),
> > > whose solution was to add a new optional argument "querystring".
> > > 
> > > Another bug that I'm looking at (#1118305) is about setting initiator
> > > IQNs for iSCSI drives; a good solution IMHO would be add a new
> > > initiator-name parameter for this.
> > > 
> > > Thinking more, I was realizing that keep adding more optional arguments
> > > to add_drive would make it a bit cluttered; for this, maybe a more
> > > flexible solution for this could be adding a single extra optional
> > > argument as hash-table (or list of "param=value") for all these
> > > rarely used parameters specific to different protocols. How would that
> > > look?
> > 
> > So that would be adding OHashtable, or using OStringList in some way?
> 
> Yes, something like either of the above; what would you think to be the
> cleanest approach here?
> 
> * OHashtable
> + better representing it is a string -> string association
> + native type for GObject, Go, Java, Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby
> - not ideal representation in C: either as list with
>   key1,value1,key2,value2,.. or with specialized type
> - mapped as list of key1,value1,key2,value2,.. in guestfish, Haskell
> - mapped as list of tuples in Erlang, OCaml
> 
> * OStringList
> + already available, in C and in bindings
> - would need manual extraction of values out of "key=value" elements
> - does not guarantee uniqueness of keys

OHashtable obviously ..

Rich.

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