Re: [libvirt] My beefs with the libvirt XML configuration format
On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 05:44:43PM +0100, Daniel Veillard wrote:
Your viewpoint is that users should edit the XML. My viewpoint is
that
software should do this, basically in normal use of libvirt nobody
should have to look at the XML, the virt-viewer/virt-install etc...
tools should generate and handle those for you. It happens that one may
have to tweak something like a pathname in a definition or something but
whatever the level of schemas available it won't help for that kind of
tweaks. Things like changing the ethernet type adapter should be a
pull down list in a gui like virt-manager, not loading the saved xml in
emacs, finding the associated relax-ng, finding the place where it's
defined and hoping emacs will get a list to pick from,
I edit libvirt XML all the time. The 'virsh edit' command is most
useful ...
I'd like to add my own rant about this though:
If an element isn't understood by libvirt, then libvirt just discards
it (without any indication or error, and without just remembering the
element in the XML).
This caused me a great deal of pain yesterday when I was adding a
<watchdog/> element to a domain on an F12 machine, but the watchdog
didn't appear in the VM. Later I discovered that libvirt on F12
predates the watchdog feature, and so it was just tossing away the
<watchdog/> element completely from the XML ...
which even if you did it right might just not work because the
domain is running and your change would be discarded on
restart... oops.
Which is also a bug.
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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