On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 01:09:50PM +0200, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
Pavel helpfully pointed out that such a client already exists: it's called virt-xml and it's part of virt-manager.
It needs a few tweaks before it can really fit the bill, but once that's been taken care of you should be able to use something like
$ virt-xml \ myguest \ --os-variant fedora28 \ --add-device \ --network network=default
and get a virtio-net device, as you should, instead of rtl8139.
Actually accepting --os-variant is the missing bit, but it should be fairly easy to do; not only that, but the existing proposal to store libosinfo metadata in the guest XML during installation has the potential to make even that entirely unnecessary!
For installation you'll obviously want to use virt-install, but that's the case already since actually installing a guest from scratch using 'virsh define' is just madness :) IIUC the use case of importing an existing guest image without booting the guest at the same time is not covered, but once again that's only a bugfix away.
So once we have these changes in place, command line users can be pretty much completely isolated from libvirt defaults, just like virt-manager and oVirt and Nova users. Then it will be up to us to actually advertise these alternatives and push users away from virsh[1] and towards them.
I wonder if showing a message suggesting to use virt-xml instead when 'virsh edit' or 'virsh attach-device' are called would be considered acceptable at that point?
Depends what you mean by showing a message ? I'd be fine with the virsh man page referring people to virt-xml as a companion tool. I would certainly not expect invokation of 'virsh edit' to print any text on the console, as it will always be valid to want to use "virsh edit", "virsh atach-device" or any other command precisely because they are an almost direct passthrough to the libvirt API without trying to inject clever logic of their own. Regards, Daniel -- |: https://berrange.com -o- https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :| |: https://libvirt.org -o- https://fstop138.berrange.com :| |: https://entangle-photo.org -o- https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :|