Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH] new SDL keyboard shortcuts to start and stop VM

[Avi Kivity]

On 10/26/2009 05:49 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> > Many applications minimize to the system tray without needing two 
> > processes.
>
>
> Minimizing or hiding the window are different use cases.  Now, I'm not 
> 100% convinced this use-case is absolutely required but historically, 
> it's always come up in discussions of improving the qemu gui.
>
> Imagine the following:
>
> A user starts a VM at a physical box.  Everythings fine but he wants 
> to return to his workstation so he closes the window.  He goes back to 
> his workstation and connects to a VNC server (on a different X 
> server).  He wants to now bring up the guest's display.

Users don't have boxes.  They have computers.  They don't want to open 
VNC clients and type in meaningless numerical addresses.  They do want 
GUIs which fit with the OSes theme, cut'n'paste, printing, and shared 
storage, all easily configurable.

(and before someone tells me I don't know what users want - users don't 
read qemu-devel, either).

> This cannot be achieved with a gui in the same process as qemu.  Is it 
> necessary to support?  I don't know.

In the priority list this is about 3000 places below having nice buttons 
to eject and insert a CDROM.  A user with a "box" would probably want to 
run the guest on a server (and use vnc, etc.).

> I'd love to just replace the SDL display with GTK + Cairo.  I'm even 
> somewhat inclined to suggest linking to python so that the gui can be 
> written in python...

Best would be to just export a QObject binding to scripting languages, 
which could then be used to implement GUIs outside the qemu source 
base.  The only tricky part is how to deal with the display.  Can we 
expose the display as a special QDict?

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