On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 15:15:27 -0600, Ryan Gahagan wrote: Hi Ryan, firstly I'd like to ask you to keep the conversation on-list. (use reply-all all the time). This ensures that the response is public and also other people can jump in and respont. At the very least it can be used for future reference. I'll be re-adding the mailing list in this response. Also please avoid top-posting in techincal lists. It's always best to respond inline at the proper context that is being discussed. Sure thing, you can always ask on the mailing list even without patches. That's a quirk of it being a positional argument (VSH_OT_DATA). A positional argument is mandatory. That is correct for example with the NBD protocol where a missing name actually means the default unnamed export. The thing is that we can't really change --source to be something else than VSH_OT_DATA since it would change the semantics of the virsh command. You probably will need to use it also for the 'name' attribute and switch the name according to the presence of the 'protocol' attribute/option. Those are two separate things. If it makes sense for a flag to be specified but empty and it impacts behaviour then you need to use VSH_OFLAG_EMPTY_OK. Any non-positional arguments (those which need --) can be made optional. On the other hand that does not say anything about how they can or can't be combined with other options and thus you need to declare that in the code. This should be an error. --source-host must require the use of --source-protocol The protocol option flag should be mandatory if you want to use the host/socket. Please trim parts of the message that are no longer relevant. [...]