Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/3] ui: remove deprecated UI frontends

["Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Wed, Aug 08, 2018 at 01:24:09PM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 08, 2018 at 11:49:27AM +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > We deprecated GTK2 and SDL1.2 in the 2.12.0 release, so they are able to
> > be removed entirely in the 3.1.0 release. The min GTK3 version can also
> > be bumped up based the distros we aim to support.
> 
> Yes for gtk2, finally the #ifdef mess is gone, yay!
> 
> Not so sure for sdl1, that one was more controversial and sdl2
> regression fixes are still tickling in (although it seems we killed most
> of them meanwhile).  Also due to sdl1 being a separate source file
> anyway the maintanance costs are not that high.
> 
> Comments?

There were some regressions wrt SDL2, but I don't think there's any
major problems still missing. If there are new problems reported, we
still have the entire of the 3.1.0 dev cycle to address them before
the release which removes it.

Even if code is separate, it still has a maint cost in testing and impacts
any refactoring we do, such as that around keymap handling which is a
non-trivial cost for something that is increasingly unused, since we
default to SDL2 ABI for many releases now. At least GTK2 still had bug-fix
releases for any security problems or serious bugs, but SDL1 has received
no releases at all upstream since 2013

So I don't see any compelling reason to keep it alive given, and enough
downside given that it has been dead in its upstream community for years. 

Regards,
Daniel
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