[libvirt] [PATCH] Allows for a <description> tag for domains

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 04:37:46PM +0200, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 03:22:43PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 03:49:05PM +0200, Matthias Bolte wrote:
> > > 2009/9/30 Daniel Veillard <veillard at redhat.com>:
> > > >  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=523639
> > > >
> > > > feature request which makes sense to me, the simple patch attached
> > > > seems to be sufficient, one can define and have the description back
> > > > in the dump. Doesn't try to keep the location of the tag, it always
> > > > get serialized after <uuid>.
> > > > The only drawbacks I can think of are:
> > > >  - others XML formats may require the same, but honnestly it's trivial
> > > >  - machine generated description (for example if the history log of
> > > >    a domain gets stored there) could grow a lot and I wonder if we
> > > >    have a hard limit on the size when transmitting xml descriptions
> > > 
> > > Such a machine generated description would contradict the intention of
> > > Rubin Simons for this description entry. IMHO this description entry
> > > should be used for user-provided descriptions only. For any other
> > > purpose (like a history log) another entry should be added.
> > 
> > I agree that a '<description>' element should be exclusively for 
> > user supplied free-form text, not interpreted by applications.
> > THe history log is the kind of idea that makes me think we should
> > group it inside the top level <metadata> element.
> 
>   Hum, I'm not sure I follow, you would like to create a metadata
> container at the top level and put <description> in it ? The problem
> is that I don't see what else we could move there.

Yes, like

 <domain>
   <name>guest</name>
   <uuid>c7a5fdbd-edaf-9455-926a-d65c16db1809</uuid>
   <metadata>
      <description>blah</description>
   </metadata>
   ....

I didn't mean we should move any other elements - this is just to serve
as a container for future expansion

Other example bits of information we could define metadata elements for
might be the operating system name, the person who created it, the
date on which it was created, the name of the appliance it was based
on, etc, etc.

Daniel
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