[libvirt] [PATCH] virsh: add aliases 'boot', 'stop', and 'restart'

[Doug Goldstein]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 9:21 AM, Eric Blake <eblake at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 11/16/2012 03:51 AM, Jiri Denemark wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 08, 2012 at 12:39:45 -0500, Laine Stump wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, Nov 08, 2012 at 03:24:07PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> NACK to this patch. I think the current command names are good.
>>>>>> Creating duplicates will make life worse. First, it creates
>>>>>> divergance from the similarly named commands for networks,
>>>>>> storage and other objects. It also means scripts written again
>>>>>> the new commands will not work with existing libvirt.
>>>
>>> I'm putting my vote with Dan on this (Just to be clear, my original
>>> message in this thread was written in the spirit of "well, if you're
>>> going to do this, then at least make sure what you're doing is
>>> explicitly documented").
>>
>> Well, I'm with Dan and Laine on this. I think adding the alias for mistyped
>> commands was good since it made life easier for those who know what command
>> they want to use keep forgetting to mistype it in the same way. However, I
>> don't like the idea of adding synonyms for commands just because it seems
>> easier for someone to remember the synonyms. It may lead to confusion when
>> people are talking about the same thing but are used to different synonyms.
>> It also destroys consistency which we have now. And we are not going to
>> translate various commands into different languages either, are we?
>>
>> However, if we wanted to still be nice to end users, we could implement
>> user-defined aliases for virsh. It would give users more power since commonly
>> used options could be aliased as well, e.g., someone always doing p2p live
>> migrations could setup an alias "lm" to be "migrate --p2p --live". And anyone
>> could make aliases to fit their needs. And I'm suggesting just a simple text
>> substitution that would just replace a recognized aliase at the beginning of a
>> command with the definition of the alias and just parse the result as if that
>> was what the user typed.

Jiri,

That's actually an outstanding idea and I think would solve a lot of
this in the future.

>
> Indeed, allowing user-defined aliases would be nicer.  I'll go ahead and
> revert my patch, and think about what it would take to let the user
> customize things instead.
>

Eric,

For your design it might be worth while to have a global place for
aliases like /etc/libvirt while also allowing one in $HOME as well.
And both would be applied for system and session libvirt's. With the
one in $HOME being able to override or at least taking precedence to
the one in /etc/libvirt.

Just my 2 cents.
-- 
Doug Goldstein