[libvirt] [PATCH 0/8] Add XML validation to the APIs

Martin Kletzander mkletzan at redhat.com
Thu Nov 20 11:02:12 UTC 2014


On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 12:51:22PM +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 09:45:39AM +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 08:23:22AM +0100, Martin Kletzander wrote:
>> > On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 05:59:47PM +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>> > >This proof of concept patch extends the virDomainDefineXML
>> > >and virDomainCreateXML APIs so that they can validate
>> > >the user supplied XML document against the RNG schemas.
>> > >
>> > >The virsh command will enable validation by default, it
>> > >must be turned off with --skip-validation if desired.
>> > >
>> > >This series is not complete
>> > >
>> > >- The network, interface, storage pool, etc APIs are
>> > >  not wired up to support validation.
>> > >- Only the QEMU virt driver is wired up to validate
>> > >- The virsh edit command is not wired up to validate
>> > >
>> > >It is enough to demonstrate it working with 'virsh define'
>> > >and the QEMU driver though.
>> > >
>> > >The biggest problem I see is the really awful error
>> > >messages we get back from libxml2 when validation
>> > >fails :-( They are essentially useless :-(
>
>> > >
>> >
>> > This is one of the things why I'm not convinced this work is worth
>> > it.  It may be nice if we tell the user their XML is invalid instead
>> > of silently losing information.  But error message similar to "invalid
>> > element in interleave" doesn't help much when you are adding 100-line
>> > XML.  There are some better validators, but requiring those would be
>> > too cumbersome.
>>
>> At least when using 'virsh edit' you would know what element you
>> just changed / added. So if you got get a generic 'validation failed'
>> error you have a pretty good idea of where in teh document you made
>> the mistake. So I think it'd be useful in that scenario. The error
>> reporting is more of a problem for the apps where they're passing in
>> a big XML document to define the guest and basically anything could
>> be wrong.
>
>So, it seems not all of the error messages are so awful. It does a bad
>job of reporting unknown elements, but if you have an unknown attribute
>it does better:
>
>  "Invalid attribute foo for element name"
>
>If you give an invalid value for an attribute which is an enum it
>is semi-usefull
>
>  "Element domain failed to validate attributes"
>
>So this does seem somewhat more useful to have in libvirt
>

As I said, I'm not against this, I agree that it will still be useful.

If you meant this as an RFC, then I misunderstood that and I should've
just wrote that as an initial PoC it's fine with me :)

Do you want me to finish the review?

Martin
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