On Fri, 28 Jun 2019 11:05:46 -0600 Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, 28 Jun 2019 11:06:48 +0200 > Cornelia Huck <cohuck@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > What do you think of a way to specify JSON for the attributes directly > > on the command line? Or would it be better to just edit the config > > files directly? > > Supplying json on the command like seems difficult, even doing so with > with jq requires escaping quotes. It's not a very friendly > experience. Maybe something more like how virsh allows snippets of xml > to be included, we could use jq to validate a json snippet provided > as a file and add it to the attributes... of course if we need to allow > libvirt to modify the json config files directly, the user could do > that as well. Is there a use case you're thinking of? Maybe we could > augment the 'list' command to take a --uuid and --dumpjson option and > the 'define' command to accept a --jsonfile. Maybe the 'start' command > could accept the same, so a transient device could define attributes > w/o excessive command line options. Thanks, > > Alex I was mostly thinking about complex configurations where writing a JSON config would be simpler than adding a lot of command line options. Something like dumping a JSON file and allowing to refer to a JSON file as you suggested could be useful; but then, those very complex use cases are probably already covered by editing the config file directly. Not sure if it is worth the effort; maybe just leave it as it is for now.