Re: [libvirt] [Qemu-devel] Re: Libvirt debug API

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 05:34:22PM +0300, Avi Kivity wrote: > On 04/26/2010 05:25 PM, Chris Lalancette wrote: > >> Right, and you are probably one of the users this work targets. But in >> general, for those not very familiar with virtualization/qemu, we want >> to steer them far clear of this API. That goes doubly true for application >> developers; we want them to be able to use a stable, long-term API and >> not have to worry about the nitty-gritty details of the monitor. It's that >> latter group that we want to make sure doesn't use this API. >> >> > With qmp, we have a stable long term API, and the nitty-gritty details > are easily hidden behind a stock json parser (unfortunately some rpc > details remain). The command line is baroque, but the libvirt xml isn't > so pretty either. > > The problem is a user that starts with libvirt and outgrows its > featureset. Do we want them to fall back to qmp? > If were QMP were to be the standard mgmt API, then you are merely inverting the problem. The problem is now a user that starts with QMP and outgrows its featureset. We have two layers in the stack here& neither provides a superset of the other. As Anthony has mentioned, this has parallels with GTK (libvirt) vs libX11 (libQMP). Programming against GTK does not give you all the features you'd have if you programmed against X, but most people do not need them and this is offset by the benefits GTK gives in portability across OS. GTK does allow them to get direct access to X if really needed, but most apps will avoid doing that if at all possible, and when it is found to be neccessary new APIs are added to GTK so that direct X11 access remains a short-term hack. We shouldn't have to frame this as a libvirt vs QMP problem. libvirt uses QMP for its work, and apps use libvirt API for the vast majority of their needs. If direct access to QMP is needed we can now provide that for apps as a short term hack, until suitable APIs are added to libvirt.

Daniel