Re: [Qemu-devel] a QOM Coding Conventions question

[Peter Crosthwaite]

On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 7:02 PM, Pantelis  Koukousoulas
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Why not add "protected" then for the fields that are only
> meant to be accessible by the implementation but not
> public ?
>

Ok by me if the documentation generation can be cleanly and easily
taught to interpret this correctly. I don't know much about the docs
TBH.

Regards,
Peter

>
> On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 1:51 AM, Peter Crosthwaite
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 9:42 AM, Peter Maydell <address@hidden>
>> wrote:
>> > On 14 December 2013 23:06, Peter Crosthwaite
>> > <address@hidden> wrote:
>> >> On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 6:26 AM, Antony Pavlov
>> >> <address@hidden> wrote:
>> >>> What do the "< private >" and "< public >" comments exactly mean here?
>> >>
>> >> Private means inaccessible to everybody, including the implementation
>> >> of class being instantiated. No one should ever dereference a private
>> >> variable, they should be managed by QOM indirectly via casts if
>> >> needed. Public means that at least someone can access it. Note that
>> >> public does not declare a free-for-all. QOM class variables may be
>> >> "public" in the sense that the class implementation may access them.
>> >> Container devices however still can not, and they are private from
>> >> that point of view.
>> >
>> > I'm not sure I find this a terribly convincing explanation. Last time
>> > I asked this IIRC the answer was just "they need to be there for the
>> > output of the documentation generator".
>> >
>> > The usual definition of 'public' vs 'private' is "what can a user of the
>> > object rather than the implementor safely access?". That would be
>> > actually interesting to document IMHO. (I should resurrect my patch
>> > for marking those fields up with __private so we enforce it...)
>> >
>>
>> Yes, that means we really have three levels of access, but only tags
>> for two. Hence the confusion over public.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Peter
>>
>> > thanks
>> > -- PMM
>> >
>>
>