Re: [libvirt] RFC: Exposing backing chains in <domain> XML

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 11:07:21AM +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: > I understand why you chose to use nesting, but I can't say I like > the appearance of nesting. I think that in the common case where > we have a single non-branching chain, the XML structure is kind of > unpleasant and would be nicer if just a flat list. Using nesting > makes it harder to extract info about backing files from the XML > structure with XPath because you can't simply ask for all <source> > elements at a given location. OTOH, with nesting, existing XPath queries keep working. https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/src/libvirt-domain.c... Have a look in this file for existing XPath queries involving /source However a flat list of backingStore nodes (as you suggested later) would not break anything. > I don't think we want todo that - there are genuine use cases where > that is a reasonable thing todo. eg you can provide a raw file to a > guest and that guest may genuinely want to format the virtual disk > it received with some other format. We don't want to taint such use > cases. Ewww by formatting you mean turning raw into qcow2??