On Fri, Feb 03, 2017 at 07:56:11PM +0100, Max Reitz wrote: > > In case you say that's inconvenient: pretty much everything about dd's > > archaic user interface is inconvenient. If you want convenient, roll > > your own. If you want familiar, stick to the original. > > I agree. But qemu-img dd already is not dd. It interprets disk image > files as virtual disks instead of as plain files. The question is > whether virtual disks are to be treated as block devices or as files. > > I don't have a strong opinion on the matter. Either way will surprise > some people. The original issue was whether to make nocreat/notrunc a > mandatory option, so if we didn't have any backwards compatibility > issues, it would be the following two surprises: > > (1) Don't make nocreat/notrunc mandatory (as it is now). Then people > who expect qemu-img dd to treat image files as block devices will > be surprised that all their data is gone. Bad.
I don't think people really expect qemu-img to treat image file as if they were block devices when operating on the host. It is like saying people expect /usr/bin/dd to treat a plain file as a block device, because they might use it with losetup later. Regards, Daniel -- |: http://berrange.com -o- http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org :| |: http://entangle-photo.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|