[libvirt] Per user preference file

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 10:21:32PM +1100, Justin Clift wrote:
> On 11/11/2010, at 9:33 PM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> <snip>
> >> [virt-viewer]
> >> more_overrides=/value/foo
> > 
> > This isn't really something virt-viewer wants to use either. As a graphical
> > desktop application, any preferences will belong in GConf / GSettings, as
> > does virt-manager.
> > 
> > So I'd really just call this ~/.virshrc
>
> That would work, but we kind of miss the lead in (opportunity) to
> provide a way for multiple apps to share "common" settings
> (intelligently).

The problem is that the multiple apps are written in several different
programming languages.  Even if we decided on a config file format
(eg. "let's use INI format") you'd still need to find libraries which
worked the same across all languages including all the details like
whitespace, quoting and escaping.

That's "just" the technical problem.  There's a social problem too.
For guestfish, as it happens, I am looking around for a decent config
file format as well, but I need a global (/etc) config and a per-user
config file, and I'd kind of prefer it if it was called
/etc/guestfish.conf because that makes it easier for users to find, oh
and we don't want to have a hard dependency on libvirt, or anything
that isn't a small, C library that is already available on Pardus,
Gentoo, Debian and MeeGo.  (Did I mention the library needs OCaml
bindings for virt-top etc?  And virt-top has a config file already, so
it'd better be compatible!)

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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