On 06/14/2011 09:59 PM, Eric Blake wrote:
On 06/14/2011 04:31 AM, Kashyap Chamarthy wrote:
(please cc me in response as I have not subscribed to this list)
Hi all,
A minor nitpick:
Every-time I suggest someone to do a force shut-down a guest using 'virsh destroy foo' , the very first question I get is -- does it _destroy_ my data?
This causes confusion to the inexperienced user and makes him/her suspect that the data/disk could be destroyed while running 'virsh destroy foo'
Maybe replacing it to a milder name like 'poweroff' or something might help?
I don't know how successful you'll be at this.
I just brought this up because more and more admins ask me what exactly is virsh trying to 'destroy' -- up until it's clarified. I understand this is nothing major, but a usability/getting-used-to thing. So, I'm not holding my breath here. I recall asking at one
point in the past about adding 'nodedev-detach' as an alias for 'nodedev-dettach' to fix the spelling error (but I can't find it in the mail archives, so it was probably a question I asked on IRC). My recollection of the response is:
1. any client that cares about maximum portability will use the older spelling, not the newer one, so adding won't help portable scripts.
True. As even my local shell scripts are used to the 'destroy' cmd now
2. adding an alias means that the user writing a new script has to read the documentation to see which of the two commands they want to use, whereas offering only one spelling makes the decision easier.
3. while we may mark old spellings as deprecated, we have no plans to remove them at any point (not even for a major number bump); backwards compatibility demands that we keep everything we ever add, and adding aliases adds that much more to maintain (although the maintenance burden of an alias is lighter than the burden for a new API).
I'm personally in favor of the idea of adding better-named aliases, so I'm not the person to convince. For this idea to work, you'll need buy-in from the Daniels (DV and danpb). And we _do_ have at least one example of an alias: 'virsh quit' and 'virsh exit' are aliases.
Thanks Eric for mentioning these. -- /kashyap