[libvirt] virt-admin commands aliases

Erik Skultety eskultet at redhat.com
Tue Sep 6 07:02:19 UTC 2016


On 05/09/16 19:48, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> 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.
> 

Yeah, for me personally, it was either number 2 or 4 but as you write,
both of them suck in their own way and I just could not decide which one
sucked less.

Thanks for opinions guys, appreciated :)

Erik

> 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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