[libvirt PATCH 0/5] Formalize the deprecation of arguments in virsh

[Michal Privoznik]

On 3/23/21 2:42 PM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 02:36:19PM +0100, Michal Privoznik wrote:
>> On 3/22/21 5:09 PM, Tim Wiederhake wrote:
>>> virsh has several arguments that are better not used. This series introduces
>>> a formal way of marking them as deprecated.
>>
>> Commit messages are rather sparse. What we currently have is hiding options
>> we deem obsolete from users and replacing them with better ones (just :Ggrep
>> VSH_OT_ALIAS). No error message, no warning. What makes these you picked
>> special? I'm not against reporting that an option is obsolete, but I don't
>> quite understand why we need a different way for obsoleting those three.
> 
> Also the general idea of deprecation is that the thing will be deleted
> eventually, which is not something we intended to do with these options.
> Basically there's a better way to do these things, but we're not going
> to break existing usage, so if users are happy with what they're doing
> they don't need to change.
> 

To be fair we never promised virsh to be stable, did we? We are trying 
to keep it as backwards compatible as we can (and so far I guess we 
didn't have a single instance of bad example), but I wouldn't mind 
telling users (esp. in interactive mode) that --optionX is now called 
--optionY.

Michal