Re: [PATCH] conf: Accept duplicate and conflicting options, the last one wins

[Paul Holzinger <pholzing@redhat.com>]

On 18/06/2024 18:17, Stefano Brivio wrote:
> 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.
To give more context: Podman allows to specify pasta options in the 
containers.conf file and on the cli. In podman we just append config 
file + cli and pass all options to pasta. As such it would be very 
difficult for users to overwrite a single option from the config file as 
pasta errors without this patch. The alternative is for Podman to parse 
the cli args and fix them before handing them to pasta but this is 
clearly not maintainable on our end.
>
> 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.
>
> Finally, somebody took care of this on Podman side at:
>    https://github.com/containers/common/pull/2052
>
> but still, we'll probably have similar cases, or older versions of
> Podman around, etc.
>
> 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.
>
> Suggested-by: Paul Holzinger<pholzing@redhat.com>
> Suggested-by: David Gibson<david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
> Signed-off-by: Stefano Brivio<sbrivio@redhat.com>
PS: The patch doesn't apply to current HEAD on https://passt.top/passt/ 
(should I use another tree?) and git doesn't offer any merge conflict 
resolution for applying patches either??? So I cannot test this locally.

-- 
Paul Holzinger