Re: GSoC Intro - TUI interface for QMP

[John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com>]

On 6/9/21 7:56 AM, Markus Armbruster wrote:
>> The client could cache the information. (Against what kind of an
>> identifier? Can QEMU report some kind of token that uniquely
>> identifies its binary or uniquely identifies the set of QAPI commands
>> it supports?)

> I proposed something like it to permit QMP clients cache
> query-qmp-schema output.  Libvirt didn't want it, so it never got beyond
> the idea stage.
> 

What ideas did you have for a cache key? We don't need to uniquely 
identify every instance or even every binary.

I suppose we could use an md5/sha1 checksum of the QMP introspection output?

>> This has the potential to exceed our capacity this summer, but a
>> prototype experiment might be helpful to inform future work anyway.
> Beware of the risk that comes with shiny stretch goals: loss of focus.
> I believe this is actually this GSoC project's main risk.

It is and I agree. I have been pushing Niteesh to complete the simplest 
possible prototype imaginable, but I believe he's identified having help 
text as something he'd really like to see, so I am investigating those 
concerns.

I do not think we'll actually be able to fully implement it start to 
finish, but it may be possible that we can implement a kind of "mockup" 
x-help command that has a few hardcoded things we can use to prototype 
the feature in the TUI.

I will keep scope creep in mind, we will pick and choose our battles. I 
am hell-bent on having *anything* checked into the tree by August, and I 
know that can be a longer process than we expect sometimes. I know this 
means keeping it small.

--js