Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Allow default network type to be determined from an environmental variable

[Paul Brook]

On Tuesday 12 February 2008, Rob Landley wrote:
> On Saturday 19 January 2008 15:10:09 Paul Brook wrote:
> > > In the absence of a global configuration file, a reasonably sane way to
> > > support this configuration system wide is to use an environmental
> > > variable.  QEMU already uses a number of global variables for
> > > configuring audio options.
> >
> > I'd really prefer we didn't do this, and preferably obsoleted/removed the
> > existing environment variables.  IMHO using environment variables is a
> > really bad idea and should be avoided wherever possible.
> >
> > Environment variables are about the worst user interface I can think of.
> > For a start they're a global resource, which is limited on some systems.
>
> On Windows, you mean?

Windows is a particularly bad example, yes.

> > It's also extremely hard to determine what environment a user is running.
>
> Type "set" with no arguments.  (I admit bash 3.x throws insane amounts of
> crap into this by default, but any program that's exposed to the FSF for an
> extended period of time bloats beyond recognition.)
>
> The sane way to do this is prefix all the environment variables QEMU uses
> with QEMU_ so you can go
>
>   set | grep QEMU
>
> And see just what you're interested in.
>
> Would that make this approach more palatable?

No.

Paul