Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 6/6] gtk: make default UI

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

On 02/19/2012 06:15 PM, Roy Tam wrote:
> 2012/2/20 Anthony Liguori<aliguori@us.ibm.com>:
>> A user can still enable SDL with '-sdl' or '-display sdl' but start making the
>> default display GTK by default.
>>
>> I'd also like to deprecate the SDL display and remove it in a few releases.
>>
>
> So, will a win32 native UI be written?

Certainly not by me :-)  It sounds easy to do but it's not.  I don't know of a 
widely available terminal widget for Windows.  Also, when you look at this GTK 
UI, there's not a whole lot different in terms of what a Windows UI would look like.

> If not, it will be nice to keep
> SDL because GTK huge and not that portable for win32 users.

Neither are true.  GTK is a reasonably small dependency especially given that 
GLIB is a mandatory dependency.  I can't imagine that in terms of binary size, 
libsdl is much bigger than gtk/gdk.

And Windows is extremely well supported by GTK so the portability comment is 
incorrect.

> (Live
> example is FreeArc(GTK) vs PeaZip(QT))

I don't view QT as an option for a couple reasons.  KDE is a second class 
citizen in Linux.  Most distributions default to Gnome these days and GTK is the 
toolkit of choice.

QT is also primarily a C++ framework, not a C framework.  We already make use of 
glib and GTK integration with a glib application is super easy and nice.  QT 
integration would be much less natural.

But I'm not attempting to remove anything in this series.  Let's see how things 
actually work and then in a couple releases, we can make decisions about SDL and 
what to do with other platforms.

I'd prefer to have a single UI but I'm not in a position to rule out platform 
specific UIs at the moment.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori