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

[Roy Tam]

2012/2/20 Anthony Liguori <address@hidden>:
> On 02/19/2012 06:15 PM, Roy Tam wrote:
>>
>> 2012/2/20 Anthony Liguori<address@hidden>:
>>>
>>> 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.

You didn't count pango, cairo, and libpng in. GTK + GDK + cairo +
pango + libpng consume 7.17MB binary size (glib binary is 1.77MB which
doesn't count in as SDL version uses glib too), on the contrary
SDL.dll is single binary and just ~300KB in size
(http://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL-1.2.15-win32.zip).
Not to mention the troublesome of recompiling GTK and its dependencies.

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

I didn't mean the portability of function but portability of binary
(no troublesome and hidden settings, easy to put in USB stick and run
everywhere)

>
>> (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
>
>