Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/3] Fix confused output for alias properties

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 08:31:08PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> Il 16/09/2014 18:56, Michael S. Tsirkin ha scritto:
> > On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 06:27:51PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> >> Il 16/09/2014 18:26, Michael S. Tsirkin ha scritto:
> >>> Right so types should be explicit.
> >>> If an arbitrary string isn't allowed, this should be documented.
> >>> It's not great as is: what's the format for macaddr? AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF?
> >>> aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff? aabbccddeeff? 0xaabbccddeeff?
> >>> But just saying "string" is going in the wrong direction imho.
> >>
> >> That's the purpose of documentation (docs/qdev-device-use.txt),
> > 
> > That's not user documentation, that's developer documentation,
> > isn't it?
> 
> It's user documentation.  It's not distributed because we suck at
> documentation.
> 
> >> and even
> >> then is better done with examples.  I don't think doing it in -device
> >> foo,help (which I'm not even sure is particularly helpful.
> > 
> > -device foo,help isn't helpful at all because it does not
> > tell people what does each option do.
> > But it really should be fixed.
> 
> Exactly.
> 
> >> I'm sympathetic towards fixing the drive->str change, but I have no idea
> >> how to do it.
> > 
> > Change legacy_name to point to a detailed human-readable
> > description of the type?
> > E.g. "Ethernet 6-byte MAC Address, format: AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF"?
> 
> If libvirt can cope with
> 
> e1000.mac=str (Ethernet 6-byte MAC Address, format: AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF)
> 
> that would work for me.

Shouldn't "str" be "string" in HMP?

Eblake - type is ignored right? Does this mean anything to the right of
= is ignored?

> > We really really should add description to all properties, too.
> 
> This is a huge job.  We have hundreds of properties.
> 
> Paolo

Right. If we don't start we won't get there though, will we?