On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 10:09:21AM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote: > IMHO configuration files are in general a failed experiment. In > practice, they do not add much value over just a shell script because > they don't allow configuring all QEMU options, they are very much fixed > (by their nature). I think it's more or less agreed that they are not > solving any problem for higher-level management stacks as well; those > would prefer to configure the VM via QMP or another API. > > So, any objections to deprecating -readconfig and -writeconfig?
-writeconfig surely can go away, it never reached the point where it could write out an configuration which is actually complete. -readconfig is a bit more tricky, it's actually useful. I'm using it sometimes. Also we have docs/config/ with a bunch of files you can pass to -readconfig. I can see that it'll stand in the way if we want move away from QemuOpts to something else (say qom-based yaml/json config files), so I wouldn't veto deprecation, but I'd prefer it not being actually dropped until the replacement is ready and the stuff in docs/config/ being converted to the new scheme. my two cents, Gerd