A QEMU case study in grappling with software complexity [LWN.net]

A QEMU case study in grappling with software complexity

Posted Oct 13, 2021 17:43 UTC (Wed) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935)
In reply to: A QEMU case study in grappling with software complexity by marcH
Parent article: A QEMU case study in grappling with software complexity

It hadn't occurred to me that this distinction would be useful to users as well, but in retrospect it's not surprising at all! The only snag is that the classification, which I made based on the implementation, would likely require some adjustment to become useful to users.

For example, "shortcut" includes some fairly common options such as -smp. "One-off" also would need a different name ("other"?) and it would also include some very common options (such as "-m").

A QEMU case study in grappling with software complexity

Posted Oct 13, 2021 19:48 UTC (Wed) by kashyap (guest, #55821) [Link]

I didn't mention it out loud during the reviews, but I agree—as a user, the classification was useful for me too, despite being familiar with many of the options. So, documenting this upstream, with appropriate caveats, can be really handy. Especially for those navigating the intimidating man page for the first time. (If you haven't already sent the patch, I can make a to-do to take a stab at the first draft :-))

A QEMU case study in grappling with software complexity

Posted Oct 13, 2021 21:11 UTC (Wed) by pm215 (subscriber, #98099) [Link] (2 responses)

Would it be helpful also if the 'shortcut' and 'combo' options documentation always included documentation of the long-form equivalents?

A QEMU case study in grappling with software complexity

Posted Oct 14, 2021 6:52 UTC (Thu) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] (1 responses)

For the combo options, that's complicated. Generally it's documented in docs/qdev-device-use.txt but that file is not yet part of the nice rST manuals.

For the shortcuts yeah, they should mention the long form.

A QEMU case study in grappling with software complexity

Posted Oct 14, 2021 7:33 UTC (Thu) by pm215 (subscriber, #98099) [Link]

It's the cases where it's complicated that are most useful to document :-)

(I've been putting off rstifying qdev-device-use because it's a big bag of stuff half of which which doesn't have an immediately obvious home in an existing bit of the rst manual...)