Re: GSoC Intro - TUI interface for QMP

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Tue, Jun 08, 2021 at 05:01:28PM +0200, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com> writes:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > A challenge will be where to pull the help text from. The QEMU server
> > is not capable (today) of sending help information over the QMP socket
> > itself.
> >
> > We will need to implement a QMP command inside of QEMU directly that
> > is capable of delivering this information to the client so that it can 
> > render it.
> >
> > Since not all versions of QEMU will have this feature, the qmp-shell
> > will need to be able to gracefully deal with the lack of help text, 
> > displaying an error indicating that this version of QEMU does not have
> > help information compiled into it.
> 
> The doc text is bulky: my bld/docs/manual/interop/qemu-qmp-ref.html is
> 1.7 MiB and growing.  Less lavish markup results in smaller data.  We
> may want to store it compressed, or load it on demand.  We might even
> have to make it compile-time optional for some use cases.

>From the POV of a TUI, I wouldn't think they necessarily need/want the
HTML format at all, because that means they now need an HTML -> text
conversion step.

IOW, an 'query-help' command might be better just sending back the
original raw docs from the .json files, and let the client then
decide how to format that. That ought to keep the data size down
as no formatting info would be included.

Regards,
Daniel
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