On 2014-11-28 at 16:55, Markus Armbruster wrote:
Copying Luiz.
Max Reitz <mre...@redhat.com> writes:
This series does not add new functionality. Adding a QMP monitor with
prettily formatted JSON output can be done as follows:
$ qemu -chardev stdio,id=mon0 -mon chardev=mon0,mode=control,pretty=on
However, this is rather cumbersome, so this series (its first patch)
adds a shortcut in the form of the new command line option -qmp-pretty.
Since the argument given to a monitor command line option (such as -qmp)
is parsed depending on its prefix and probably also depending on the
current phase of the moon, this is cleaner than trying to add a "switch"
to -qmp itself (in the form of "-qmp stdio,pretty=on").
Yet another "convenience" option *groan*
Why can't we simply make -qmp set pretty=on and be done with it?
It's a convenience option, i.e. meant for humans, and why would humans
*not* want pretty=on?
Well, pretty=on produces really long output. I prefer short output if I
don't expect to run commands like query-block which are completely
unreadable with pretty=off.
I personally had a really bad taste when I saw that I couldn't modify
-qmp somehow to get it to set pretty=on optionally. But then, after
having implemented -qmp-pretty in basically five lines (the "case"
statement for that option and the qemu_opt_set_bool() in
monitor_parse()), I could send the series with a clear conscience. It's
not that there's a new convenience option which is really bad to
maintain and will break after the first gentle blow, as it reuses all
the code paths from -qmp, which we will keep anyway.
Since this is only in block-next, I wouldn't object to it being dropped
and making pretty=on the default for -qmp, in principle. But I
personally like having a convenience pretty=off option, too, because I
as a human often actually don't want pretty=on.
Max
