[virt-tools-list] [virt-manager] Any interest in the <clock> element?

[Cole Robinson]

On 01/10/2019 04:43 AM, Pavel Hrdina wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 09, 2019 at 11:31:51PM +0200, Povilas Kanapickas wrote:
>> Hey,
>>
>> Does it make sense to wrap the data in the <clock> element [1] within
>> the virt-manager GUI? I would be interested in implementing support for
>> that.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm not so sure about this feature in GUI.  I don't know the current
> state in virt-manager/virt-install but it sounds that we should pick
> the best default based on the selected/detected os-variant during
> installation.  But fine-tuning these attributes sounds more like
> advanced feature which we usually try not to introduce in GUI for now.
> 
> So if virt-manager/virt-install is not selecting the best configuration
> patches to fix that would be definitely welcomed.  From the
> documentation it looks like the best configuration depends on the OS
> installed inside the guest, we try to put all this information into
> osinfo-db project which virt-manager/virt-install already uses.
> 

I agree with all this.

I realize though that users that just want to live in a single app want 
a UI way to edit any XML property they might need. So I'm planning in 
the medium term to explore a raw XML editing mode in virt-manager. This 
will take the pressure off of us to implement UI for these type of XML 
properties that aren't commonly adjusted, allow us to reduce the UI 
surface further, which will make the app easier to maintain over the 
long term.

For domains, I'm thinking either a tab in the Details->Overview page, 
which will show the full domain XML, or its own entry in the hardware 
list, like 'Domain XML'. Individual device info pages could have a tab 
at the top labeled 'Device XML' if the user just wants to edit a single 
device. The text viewer should probably be gtksourceview which I believe 
has XML syntax highlighting support, but I've never used the API so I 
can't speak from experience.

If that works out then there's opportunities to extend this paradigm to 
the virtual networks and storage pools pages, and to the wizards 
addhardware, createnet, createpool, createvol, maybe cloning too.

So Povilas if you are interested in a project, that's an option. A first 
pass doesn't need to be perfect, I assume there's going to be some 
hidden pitfalls, but a starting point will help get the ball rolling

Thanks,
Cole