I noticed that with the (more or less) recent series from Marc-André the output of qemu-img amend -f qcow2 -o help changed to this:
$ ./qemu-img amend -f qcow2 -o help Creation options for 'qcow2': qcow2-create-opts.backing_file=str - File name of a base image qcow2-create-opts.backing_fmt=str - Image format of the base image qcow2-create-opts.cluster_size=size - qcow2 cluster size qcow2-create-opts.compat=str - Compatibility level (0.10 or 1.1) [...] The types are a nice addition, but I didn't like having the list name printed in every single line (in fact, the list name does not make any sense here at all, because there already is a caption which reads "Creation options for 'qcow2'"), and I did not like the use of '=' for types. In general, I don't like the robot-y appearance, which is even worse in things like -device virtio-blk,help, which gives you this (among other lines): > virtio-blk-pci.iothread=link<iothread> Sadly, there isn't much we can do about the "link<iothread>", so this series doesn't improve on that point. What this series does do, however, is it changes these lists not to print the list name on every single line, but only as a caption (and for option lists, this caption is option, because the caller may want to print a custom caption that is more expressive -- as is the case for qemu-img amend -o help). Consequentially, all list items are indented by two spaces to make clear they belong to the caption. I can already see that some people might disagree on having this indentation, but I like it, so I have it in this series. Furthermore, '=' for types is changed to ': '. Thus, after this series, the amend output looks like this: $ ./qemu-img amend -f qcow2 -o help Creation options for 'qcow2': backing_file: str - File name of a base image backing_fmt: str - Image format of the base image cluster_size: size - qcow2 cluster size compat: str - Compatibility level (0.10 or 1.1) [...] virtio-blk's list presents itself like so: $ x86_64-softmmu/qemu-system-x86_64 -device virtio-blk,help virtio-blk-pci options: iothread: link<iothread> request-merging: bool (on/off) secs: uint32 [...] (which is still not perfect, but at least it no longer looks like it's been generated for consumption by libvirt) And now we even print something when there are no options: $ x86_64-softmmu/qemu-system-x86_64 -object can-bus,help There are no options for can-bus. (Before this series, there just is no output.) As a side effect, patch 1 fixes iotest 082. Max Reitz (5): option: Make option help nicer to read chardev: Indent list of chardevs qdev-monitor: Make device options help nicer object: Make option help nicer to read fw_cfg: Drop newline in @file description include/qemu/option.h | 2 +- chardev/char.c | 2 +- qdev-monitor.c | 7 +- qemu-img.c | 4 +- util/qemu-option.c | 31 +- vl.c | 14 +- tests/qemu-iotests/082.out | 956 ++++++++++++++++++------------------- 7 files changed, 521 insertions(+), 495 deletions(-) -- 2.17.1
