[libvirt] virt-admin commands aliases

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Sep 05, 2016 at 05:37:07PM +0200, Erik Skultety wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> after my presentation at KVM Forum, it was pointed out from the audience
> that we might think about doing something about the naming of the
> virt-admin's comands, since there is some sort of inconsistency: srv-
> vs. client- vs. dmn- (not merged yet). When I sent patches to upstream I
> already knew that the naming was not optimal, but I didn't come up with
> anything better so I hoped that the reviewer might think of something
> better which unfortunately did not happen.
> 
> Anyway, there are multiple options how this can be approached but I'm
> not 100% satisfied with neither of them:
> 
> 1) rename the commands completely
> Although clean, obviously this is the non-preferred option because this
> would break any backwards compatibility however, I think there is a fair
> chance that people haven't actually started using it yet (although that
> might change between 7.3 and 7.4).
> 
> 2) create aliases for non-abbreviated forms of the commands
> That way, srv- would become server- and dmn- would become daemon-.
> However, by doing this we'll end up with 6 almost identical entries in
> the commands structure which might be error-prone once we decide to
> add/create&add a flag to the command primitive, since the flag would
> have to be added both to the alias and to the original (unlikely, but
> possible that someone might forget about that)
> 
> 3) abbreviate client- to something like clnt-
> Identical to the above except for the amount of duplicate entries which
> would be reduced to 2
> 
> 4) leave it as is if such a consensus is reached and accepted
> I guess this does no need any additional comments.

I just vote for 4.

In retrospect it would have been nice to use 'server' instead of
'srv', but ultimately it isn't a functional problem.  The "solutions"
create extra code and/or inconsitency and/or break back-compat so just
aren't worth it IMHO.

IOW, admit 'srv' sucks but don't change it, and ensure new server
commands continue to use 'srv' for consistency.

We can of couse use 'daemon-' as prefix for new commands, since we
have not yet released any versions using 'dmn-' as prefix


Regards,
Daniel
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