Libguestfs - Dec 2015 - Re: RFC: arbitrary parameters for add_drive

Hi,

one of the bugs we have (#1092583) is about the lack of query string
for http/https URLs: there were patches about that (not merged yet),
whose solution was to add a new optional argument "querystring".

Another bug that I'm looking at (#1118305) is about setting initiator
IQNs for iSCSI drives; a good solution IMHO would be add a new
initiator-name parameter for this.

Thinking more, I was realizing that keep adding more optional arguments
to add_drive would make it a bit cluttered; for this, maybe a more
flexible solution for this could be adding a single extra optional
argument as hash-table (or list of "param=value") for all these
rarely used parameters specific to different protocols. How would that
look?

Thanks,
-- 
Pino Toscano

On Wed, Dec 02, 2015 at 02:10:52PM +0100, Pino Toscano
wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> one of the bugs we have (#1092583) is about the lack of query string
> for http/https URLs: there were patches about that (not merged yet),
> whose solution was to add a new optional argument "querystring".
> 
> Another bug that I'm looking at (#1118305) is about setting initiator
> IQNs for iSCSI drives; a good solution IMHO would be add a new
> initiator-name parameter for this.
> 
> Thinking more, I was realizing that keep adding more optional arguments
> to add_drive would make it a bit cluttered; for this, maybe a more
> flexible solution for this could be adding a single extra optional
> argument as hash-table (or list of "param=value") for all these
> rarely used parameters specific to different protocols. How would that
> look?
So that would be adding OHashtable, or using OStringList in some way?

Anyway, yes, seems reasonable.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines.  Supports shell scripting,
bindings from many languages.  http://libguestfs.org

On Thursday 03 December 2015 11:52:14 Richard W.M. Jones
wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 02, 2015 at 02:10:52PM +0100, Pino Toscano wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > one of the bugs we have (#1092583) is about the lack of query string
> > for http/https URLs: there were patches about that (not merged yet),
> > whose solution was to add a new optional argument
"querystring".
> > 
> > Another bug that I'm looking at (#1118305) is about setting
initiator
> > IQNs for iSCSI drives; a good solution IMHO would be add a new
> > initiator-name parameter for this.
> > 
> > Thinking more, I was realizing that keep adding more optional
arguments
> > to add_drive would make it a bit cluttered; for this, maybe a more
> > flexible solution for this could be adding a single extra optional
> > argument as hash-table (or list of "param=value") for all
these
> > rarely used parameters specific to different protocols. How would that
> > look?
> 
> So that would be adding OHashtable, or using OStringList in some way?
Yes, something like either of the above; what would you think to be the
cleanest approach here?

* OHashtable
+ better representing it is a string -> string association
+ native type for GObject, Go, Java, Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby
- not ideal representation in C: either as list with
  key1,value1,key2,value2,.. or with specialized type
- mapped as list of key1,value1,key2,value2,.. in guestfish, Haskell
- mapped as list of tuples in Erlang, OCaml

* OStringList
+ already available, in C and in bindings
- would need manual extraction of values out of "key=value" elements
- does not guarantee uniqueness of keys

-- 
Pino Toscano