On 4 January 2018 at 15:47, Paolo Bonzini <pbonz...@redhat.com> wrote: > The point of deprecation is not to make the interface simpler, it is to > avoid cases where one option is doing too much and/or crossing > abstraction boundaries, for example -net creating both a device and a > hub port. > > "-serial" is okay because it only creates the front-end, it's the board > that decides how to attach it to the back-end. > > -usbdevice creating both a front-end and a back-end is not a problem per > se. The issue with -usbdevice is just that it's too much code. > > However, adding magic to "-device usb-braille" that creates both a > front-end and a back-end is completely the opposite of sane...
Agreed with this. Is there any mileage in considering the idea of a generic bit in the option-parsing code that has a table of mappings from legacy-style-simple-option to complex-set-of-device-etc options, so we can retain userfriendliness without per-kind-of-thing special casing, or is that too simplistic to work ? thanks -- PMM