On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 04:30:19PM +0200, Jes Sorensen wrote: > On 07/19/11 16:24, Eric Blake wrote: > > [adding the libvir-list] > > On 07/19/2011 08:09 AM, Jes Sorensen wrote: > >> Urgh, libvirt parsing image files is really unfortunate, it really > >> doesn't give me warm fuzzy feelings :( libvirt really should not know > >> about internals of image formats. > > > > But even if you add new features to qemu to avoid needing this in the > > future, it doesn't change the past - libvirt will always have to know > > how to parse image files understood by older qemu, and so as long as > > libvirt already knows how to do that parsing, we might as well take > > advantage of it. > > What has been done here in the past is plain wrong. Continuing to do it > isn't the right thing to do here. > > > Besides, I feel that having a well-documented file format, so that > > independent applications can both parse the same file with the same > > semantics by obeying the file format specification, is a good design goal. > > We all know that documentation is rarely uptodate, new features may not > get added and libvirt will never be able to keep up. The driver for a > file format belongs in QEMU and nowhere else. This would be possible if QEMU to provide a libblockformat.so library which allowed apps to extract metadata from file formats using a stable API. Daniel -- |: http://berrange.com -o- http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: http://entangle-photo.org -o- http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :| -- libvir-list mailing list libvir-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libvir-list