Re: The madness of ad hoc special IDs

[Markus Armbruster]

Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com> writes:

> Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com> writes:
>
>> On 23/05/2023 14.31, Markus Armbruster wrote:
>> ...
>>> To stop creating more moles, we need to reserve IDs for the system's
>>> use, and let the system pick only reserved IDs going forward.
>>
>> Just something to add here: We already have a function for generating
>> internal IDs, the id_generate() function in util/id.c ... our

id_generate() generates IDs of the form #<subsystem><number>, where
<number> counts up.  Suitable for IDs that are not part of the stable
interface.

When a system-picked ID needs to be part of the stable interface, we
pick it in some other way.

>> convention is that we use "#" as prefix for those, so for new code
>> (which is not affected by migration backward compatibility problems),
>> we should maybe take care of always using that prefix for internal
>> IDs, too.
>
> Valid point.

I propose to move towards the QAPI naming rules for user-picked IDs:
must begin with a letter, and contain only ASCII letters, digits,
hyphen, and underscore.