Re: [libvirt] [PATCH v2 14/21] conf: Shorten names in virDomainChrSerialTarget enumeration

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 05:42:24PM +0100, Andrea Bolognani wrote: > Now that the target type is no longer formatted on the QEMU command > line, we don't need the values to match the QEMU device names any > longer, so we can shorten the names and reduce redundancy by dropping > the -serial suffix: this also has the nice side-effect that target > type and address type will now match. > > We still need to parse the old names, and format them when preparing > a migratable XML, to preserve backwards compatibility. This would be probably nice to rename, but I'm afraid that we cannot do that. Even though you've made the effort to translate the old name into new name if management application creates the XML using the old name, the issue here is that it will no longer understand what the new name means until the management application is updated. Therefore this change is not backward compatible.