Re: [Qemu-devel] Qemu frontend proposal

[Kyle Hayes <kyle@silverbeach.net>]

On Friday 23 April 2004 00:13, Jean-Michel POURE wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> Fabrice expressed the need for a Qemu frontend. Before working on
> anything, I would like to discuss about possible plans and receive
> some feedback.
>
> My proposals are:
>
> 1) Framework : wxWidgets
> 2) Interface builder : wxGlade

There are two perfectly good toolkits that are on nearly every distro 
out of the box right now:  GTK and Qt.  Both have excellent tools and 
language bindings and interface builders.  Python has perfectly good 
bindings for Qt and GTK on its own.  I see no functional need at all 
to introduce yet another toolkit.

Building open source projects is already getting to be more and more 
annoying as each one wants to bring in another fifty dependencies 
that are not usually installed.  And, each one wants to wrap some 
perfectly good libraries in their own just-barely-different wrappers.  
The more dependencies everything has the more likely we'll all end up 
in the Linux version of Windows DLL hell.

Please, please, please think twice about introducing new dependencies!

What are the goals for a QEMU interface?  Here's what I'd like to see:

1) portable.

2) very lightweight.

3) remotely accessible.

4) easily maintained and changed.

5) i18n.

What this says to me is that a web interface would cover what I want.  
And, that is guaranteed to be portable.   In my experience, an 
embedded web interface tends to be smaller (code size) than any 
toolkit-based code.    When the browser isn't up, you aren't using 
that memory.

Better yet, make the interface in QEMU in XML-RPC and then everyone 
and their dog can write an interface in any language or system.  
Please stay with the Unix philosophy of making each tool do one thing 
well.

Best,
Kyle