Re: [PULL 31/31] qemu-option: warn for short-form boolean options

[Peter Maydell]

On Mon, 15 Feb 2021 at 23:15, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Il lun 15 feb 2021, 20:56 Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> ha scritto:
>>
>> 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.

That is definitely a nonsensical example. But it's not clear to me
that it's an improvement to start forbidding previously sensible and
working command lines in order to be able to diagnose nonsensical
command lines which it seems unlikely that anybody was ever actually
using.

-- PMM