Christian Brunschen wrote:
On 11 Aug 2007, at 19:06, Philip Boulain wrote:
Yikes. I like the intent, but the idea of a previously just-data file
format suddenly being able to imply "-hdb fat:rw:/home/" does not
strike me as a good one. :/
Hi all,
I'm nobody in particular in the world of qemu, and have certainly
never contributed to it, but I hope you won't mind if I mention some
thoughts.
It seems to me that overloading a simple data format to suddenly also
include metadata is indeed a decision fraught with potential for
unhappiness.
Much better would be to perhaps devise a container format that would
embed a qemu configuration as well as a number of disk image files. Of
course, to have such ini a single file is not necessarily very easy.
However, one need only look at NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Mac OS X to see a
solution: use a directory.
I expect we'll see something like this emerge in the future.
Regards,
ANthonY Liguori
Basically, one way to bundle a machine configuration together yet
leave existing file formats unchanged is to define a standard
directory structure that can contain a qemu configuration file (a set
of command line options) as well as a number of related files (mainly
disk images, but could also me BIOS ROM or similar of course). It
doesn't need to be a complex structure: simply specify that a 'qemu
machine directory' contains a file named 'config.qemu' in a specific
format (with file references relative to the directory containing
config.qemu). qemu, if given as its sole command line option the name
of a directory, checks whether the directory contains a suitable
config.qemu, and reads & process the file as if it were command line
options (with the current directory.
Such a directory can be kept entirely platform independent, such that
the entire directory could be moved or copied from one host to
another. It would mean perhaps tar:ing or zip:ing it up, but certainly
on Mac OS X such directories have proven to be a successful way of
bundling things together (certainly helped by the widespread use of
disk image files, through which distributing directories becomes
entirely a non-problem).
Something like that _should_ offer most of the features that people
want - a simple way to encapsulate both configuration and data,
platform-independent, short and sweet to specify on the command line,
without making any changes to existing file formats (particularly disk
image ones).
Just a thought,
// Christian Brunschen
