Hi,
I’m currently migrating from LXC and libvirt to Incus 7.0 and I’m having a lot of pleasant surprises along the way. Incus feels very intuitively designed - not needlessly complex, yet very powerful - and so far also very stable. Huge thanks to all the developers for the great work, it’s honestly a joy and a privilege to work with Incus. 
During the migration I ran into a small, mostly cosmetic detail: I noticed that Incus uses the snapshot- prefix for all its ZFS snapshot names.
I completely understand the need for having your own “namespace” on the storage backend. However, this particular prefix felt quite generic to me, and it took me a moment to realize that this is an Incus convention. Personally, I’d prefer something more obviously Incus‑specific, especially because I have my own scripts interacting with ZFS snapshots and a more distinctive naming pattern would make it easier to spot which snapshots belong to Incus and which are mine.
At the same time, I fully realize that this prefix is likely wired into a lot of places in the code and changing it globally would be complicated and risky – it could introduce regressions in snapshot‑related logic and tools, and would also affect existing installations.
So I was thinking about a compromise that would keep the core simple and stable, but still give interested users some flexibility:
-
Make the snapshot prefix configurable (with the default staying as
snapshot-). -
In code, replace the hardcoded
"snapshot-"with a configurable value. -
Existing installations would be unaffected (default remains
snapshot-), while anyone who really wants a different prefix could opt in and then rely on that in their own scripts and tooling.
This would avoid breaking changes while opening a path for more explicit naming on setups that need it.
Does this line of thinking make sense from your perspective?
Would such an option be useful or acceptable for you as developers and for other users?
Have a nice days!
Roman
