On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 14:50:09 +0100, Michal Privoznik wrote:
On 3/23/21 2:42 PM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 02:36:19PM +0100, Michal Privoznik wrote:
On 3/22/21 5:09 PM, Tim Wiederhake wrote:
virsh has several arguments that are better not used. This series introduces a formal way of marking them as deprecated.
Commit messages are rather sparse. What we currently have is hiding options we deem obsolete from users and replacing them with better ones (just :Ggrep VSH_OT_ALIAS). No error message, no warning. What makes these you picked special? I'm not against reporting that an option is obsolete, but I don't quite understand why we need a different way for obsoleting those three.
Also the general idea of deprecation is that the thing will be deleted eventually, which is not something we intended to do with these options. Basically there's a better way to do these things, but we're not going to break existing usage, so if users are happy with what they're doing they don't need to change.
To be fair we never promised virsh to be stable, did we? We are trying to
I'd say we do, at least for the reasonably machine-usable interfaces (for output [1]), thus any input options should be treated as such.
keep it as backwards compatible as we can (and so far I guess we didn't have a single instance of bad example), but I wouldn't mind telling users (esp. in interactive mode) that --optionX is now called --optionY.
Well, that's what we do with the alias and documentation changes. But removing --optionX completely would be wrong: - It needlessly breaks scripts - If you decide to print a deprecation warning, the code usually won't be much simpler. - most cases are covered by use of _ALIAS to a better name The only thing that IMO should be removed but I didn't for compatibility is the 'secret-set-value's 'base64' parameter as that is insecure. There isn't a compatible replacement though. [1] Table outputs and other clearly human-targetted output may obviously break, but for many of the output cases we provide machine-friendly variants, such as '--uuid'/'--name' for listing APIs.