Re: [libvirt] My beefs with the libvirt XML configuration format

This is something that has always bugged me as well, and is indeed a pain to deal with in virt-manager when doing things like changing cdrom media. I think we should just loosen the input restrictions, so that any path passed via the <source> properties file, dev, or dir are used, but will be dumped with the 'correct' property to maintain back compat. That said, I think the XML format is pretty straight forward. The above caveat you mention is the only real annoying thing. The one other stumbling block is that not all devices have a unique property to key off of in the XML (ex. you can have two identical <video> devices). This makes life difficult for virt-manager when removing a device, but it hasn't been a big issue in practice.