feat: put all files related to a VM in one place

[blakemcbride]

I confirm this feature has not been previously requested

• [ x] I have searched the issues and this feature has not previously been requested

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When you create a VM, all of the files related to that VM get put in a single directory. This makes it easy to backup and move the VM. The problem is that the .conf file gets placed one directory up. This means one of the important files is in a different directory. This muddies up the higher directory and makes it harder to move and backup the VM because you have to remember the .conf file.

Describe the solution you'd like

Move the .conf file into the same directory as its associated VM. When you start a VM, rather than specifying the .conf file, specify the directory. Quickemu can then find the .conf file in the directory (but don't depend on the directory name being the same as the file name; just look for a .conf file and assume there will only be one).

Describe alternatives you've considered

In addition to the --vm option now, you can add an option that will do what I am saying. Thus you can be backward compatible.

Additional context

No additional context.

[philclifford]

There are many ways to not forget the .conf file when working with VMs. This change would completely break quickgui.

[blakemcbride]

Yes, it is trivial to make a hard link from the config file into the VM directory. quickget could easily do that. The problem is, why dirty up the common directory with all of those .conf files?

It would be very easy to make it backward compatible.

I've never used quickgui. quickemu has been fine for my needs. However, I am absolutely certain that quickget, quickemu, and quickgui could be trivially changes to accommodate my suggested architecture. quickemu and quickgui could just use the new architecture and if it doesn't find the files it needs, simply look one directory up.

If there is interest, I'd be happy to learn quickgui and draw out the flow chart / algorithm.

[lj3954]

There are many ways to not forget the .conf file when working with VMs. This change would completely break quickgui.

The solution I plan to implement for quickemu-rs is to have a 'vm_dir' field in the configuration, which will default to the filename (omitting extension), and accept either an absolute path or path relative to the config file's location (. would work for current directory). This would handle this request as well as allowing for more flexibility for other use cases, without resulting in a breaking change. I would explore the possibility of implementing the same in quickemu bash.