Re: [Qemu-devel] news on the OS X cocoa port

[Mike Kronenberg]

Jim C. Brown wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 21, 2005 at 04:00:12PM +0200, Ren? Korthaus wrote:
>  
>
> > That is what I was also thinking about for some time, but first we  
> > should then agree on an universal way of saving configurations (this  
> > was already been touched by the list some time ago, couldnt find the  
> > mails by now). As I am pretty much satisfied with saving the data in  
> > an xml file, I would suggest this way, but we shouldnt only focus on  
> > Mac OS X part, but also on other platforms.
> >
> >    
>
> I have a shell script that provides config file support for qemu called vqemu.
> Basicly the format is a simple "option=value", the shell script sources the
> config file in and then passes certain command line options to qemu based on
> the options given.
>
> The script should be easy to modify to use on OS X. To make it more portable
> (e.g. usable on Windows), converting it to C is not terribly difficult.
>
>  
Right now I'm using .plist(property lists), which is very common in OS 
X, because you can read them back directly in to an Array or a 
Dictionaty. It's a standardized XML File.
I'm a big fan of XML, but I'm also very much Intrested in having a 
compatible package over all platforms.
I see advantage in XML, because it's a lot more flexible and accurat in 
storing your Data - well it was defined exactly for that pourpose :)

My packages look like this:
~/Documents/QEMU/Freedos.qemu/configuration.plist
~/Documents/QEMU/Freedos.qemu/hda.img
~/Documents/QEMU/Freedos.qemu/saved.vm
~/Documents/QEMU/Freedos.qemu/thumbnail.png
or:
~/Documents/QEMU/ReactOS 15412.qemu/configuration.plist
~/Documents/QEMU/ReactOS 15412.qemu/hda.img
~/Documents/QEMU/ReactOS 15412.qemu/saved.vm
~/Documents/QEMU/ReactOS 15412.qemu/thumbnail.png

They can nicely be ziped.

A sample configuration .plist:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" 
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd";>
<plist version="1.0">
   <dict>
       <key>-boot</key>
       <string>1</string>
       <key>-cdrom</key>
       <string></string>
       <key>-fda</key>
       <string></string>
       <key>-hda</key>
       <string>/Users/mike/Documents/qemu/images/2gb_win2k.img</string>
       <key>-m</key>
       <string>128</string>
       <key>cpu</key>
       <string>0</string>
       <key>custom</key>
       <string></string>
       <key>name</key>
       <string>win2ksp4</string>
       <key>status</key>
       <string>shutdown</string>
   </dict>
</plist>

I'm also looking into writing a converter for vpc packages, which are 
very similar :)

Mike