On Tuesday 12 February 2008, Rob Landley wrote: > On Saturday 19 January 2008 15:10:09 Paul Brook wrote: > > > In the absence of a global configuration file, a reasonably sane way to > > > support this configuration system wide is to use an environmental > > > variable. QEMU already uses a number of global variables for > > > configuring audio options. > > > > I'd really prefer we didn't do this, and preferably obsoleted/removed the > > existing environment variables. IMHO using environment variables is a > > really bad idea and should be avoided wherever possible. > > > > Environment variables are about the worst user interface I can think of. > > For a start they're a global resource, which is limited on some systems. > > On Windows, you mean?
Windows is a particularly bad example, yes. > > It's also extremely hard to determine what environment a user is running. > > Type "set" with no arguments. (I admit bash 3.x throws insane amounts of > crap into this by default, but any program that's exposed to the FSF for an > extended period of time bloats beyond recognition.) > > The sane way to do this is prefix all the environment variables QEMU uses > with QEMU_ so you can go > > set | grep QEMU > > And see just what you're interested in. > > Would that make this approach more palatable? No. Paul
