Alternatively, maybe we could not deprecate this really common syntax
pattern that's going to be in lots of peoples' examples, tutorials,
shell scripts and command lines ?
Unfortunately there is no way to change the code to distinguish okay uses from broken ones. The fundamental issue is that QemuOpts is sometimes typed and sometimes not, so it lacks the information to say that "-chardev socket,server" is fine but "-device virtio-blk-pci,noserial" ("set serial number to the string 'no'") is not.
I don't plan to remove the syntax altogether from QemuOpts, but I want to keep open the possibility of switching some options (especially -machine and -object) to a parser which doesn't support it.
Paolo