[libvirt] My beefs with the libvirt XML configuration format

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 12:09:23PM -0500, Cole Robinson wrote:
> 
> This is something that has always bugged me as well, and is indeed a
> pain to deal with in virt-manager when doing things like changing cdrom
> media. I think we should just loosen the input restrictions, so that any
> path passed via the <source> properties file, dev, or dir are used, but
> will be dumped with the 'correct' property to maintain back compat.
> 
> That said, I think the XML format is pretty straight forward. The above
> caveat you mention is the only real annoying thing. The one other
> stumbling block is that not all devices have a unique property to key
> off of in the XML (ex. you can have two identical <video> devices). This
> makes life difficult for virt-manager when removing a device, but it
> hasn't been a big issue in practice.

That is going to change in the near future. I'm about to post patches
which give every single device a <address> element containing their
unique PCI, USB, or disk controller address. In addition every device
will likely get a unique short name.

Daniel
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