Re: proposal: deprecate -readconfig/-writeconfig

[Gerd Hoffmann]

On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 10:09:21AM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> IMHO configuration files are in general a failed experiment.  In
> practice, they do not add much value over just a shell script because
> they don't allow configuring all QEMU options, they are very much fixed
> (by their nature).  I think it's more or less agreed that they are not
> solving any problem for higher-level management stacks as well; those
> would prefer to configure the VM via QMP or another API.
> 
> So, any objections to deprecating -readconfig and -writeconfig?

-writeconfig surely can go away, it never reached the point where it
could write out an configuration which is actually complete.

-readconfig is a bit more tricky, it's actually useful.  I'm using it
sometimes.  Also we have docs/config/ with a bunch of files you can
pass to -readconfig.

I can see that it'll stand in the way if we want move away from QemuOpts
to something else (say qom-based yaml/json config files), so I wouldn't
veto deprecation, but I'd prefer it not being actually dropped until the
replacement is ready and the stuff in docs/config/ being converted to
the new scheme.

my two cents,
  Gerd