In multiple occasions, especially when passt(1) and
pasta(1) are used
in integrations such as the one with Podman, the ability to override
earlier options on the command line with later one would have been
convenient.
Recently, to debug a number of issues happening with Podman, I would
have liked to ask users to share a debug log by passing --debug as
additional option, but pasta refuses --quiet (always passed by Podman)
and --debug at the same time.
On top of this, Podman lets users specify other pasta options in its
containers.conf(5) file, as well as on the command line.
The options from the configuration files are appended together with
the ones from the command line, which makes it impossible for users to
override options from the configuration file, if duplicated options
are refused, unless Podman takes care of sorting them, which is
clearly not sustainable.
For --debug and --trace, somebody took care of this on Podman side at:
https://github.com/containers/common/pull/2052
but this doesn't fix the issue with other options, and we'll have
anyway older versions of Podman around, too.
I think there's some value in telling users about duplicated or
conflicting options, because that might reveal issues in integrations
or accidental misconfigurations, but by now I'm fairly convinced that
the downsides outweigh this.
Drop checks about duplicate options and mutually exclusive ones. In
some cases, we need to also undo a couple of initialisations caused
by earlier options, but this looks like a simplification, overall.
Notable exception: --stderr still conflicts with --log-file, because
users might have the expectation that they don't actually conflict.
But they do conflict in the existing implementation, so it's safer
to make sure that the users notice that.
Suggested-by: Paul Holzinger <pholzing(a)redhat.com>
Suggested-by: David Gibson <david(a)gibson.dropbear.id.au>
Signed-off-by: Stefano Brivio <sbrivio(a)redhat.com>
---
v2:
- report --log-file and --stderr as conflicting, but accept
multiple options if they don't conflict
- for --log-file and --pcap, make it clear in the man page that
the general principle still applies: only the last one (of each)
takes effect
- add some more context about Podman and how the list of pasta
options is built there, in the commit message
conf.c | 134 ++++++++++++++++----------------------------------------
passt.1 | 17 +++++++
2 files changed, 55 insertions(+), 96 deletions(-)