On Mon, Feb 21, 2022 at 05:28:24PM +0100, Wim de With wrote: > On Mon, Feb 21, 2022 at 10:21:32AM -0500, Andrea Bolognani wrote: > > We are aware of the issues with the current API of libvirt-rs, but > > unfortunately nobody has been able to dedicate time to addressing > > them. Any contributions towards that goal that you or anyone else > > could make would certainly be greatly appreciated! > > > > Breaking the API should be fine I think. The current version number > > is 0.2.11, so there shouldn't be any expectation in terms of API > > stability. > > I realized that GitLab is nowadays used for communication so I made more > specific issues there. Do you prefer merge requests there or patches on > the mailing list? Merge requests exclusively for anything other than libvirt.git > > Note that libvirt-python is mostly autogenerated, and there is an > > ongoing effort to make the same happen for libvirt-go-module. Ideally > > libvirt-rust would also follow this trend and end up with very little > > manually-written code in it. > > I've done some experiments here with bindgen, and it is pretty > straightforward to generate FFI bindings using it. The problem is that > generating safe idiomatic Rust wrappers on top of these bindings is > non-trivial. Still, most wrapper functions will probably follow the same > pattern, so it may be useful to investigate if macros could be used to > make it easier to add new functions. > > >From looking at the Git diff from v2.5.0 to v8.0.0, the libvirt API > doesn't seem to change that often. Almost all changes consist of adding > new enum variants and some new functions. Am I correct in assuming that > an application that was written for v2.5.0 would still work with v8.0.0? Correct, libvirt never knowingly breaks API compatibility. The API is strictly append-only. > To me it seems the best course of action would be to pick some minimum > version of libvirt to support, and make sure that the Rust API wraps all > functions there. From that point, adding functions and enum variants > introduced in later versions of libvirt can be incremental changes and > will (hopefully) be fairly easy to add. Rust has the concept of features > to enable conditional compiling of those functions and enum variants > only when the underlying libvirt supports them. Conditional compilation is what we do in Go / Python bindings too. Regards, Daniel -- |: https://berrange.com -o- https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :| |: https://libvirt.org -o- https://fstop138.berrange.com :| |: https://entangle-photo.org -o- https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :|
