Re: [Qemu-devel] Unmaintained QEMU builds

[Andreas Färber]

Am 17.08.2010 um 21:56 schrieb Anthony Liguori:

> I think my point is that Win32 is a "never to be finished feature".
>
> Every time I've ever tried to use it, it's a short period of time  
> before it seg faults.  I have a hard time believing that anyone is  
> using it seriously.

No "serious" Windows user will consider QEMU a viable alternative to  
the free-as-in-beer VMware as long as it doesn't provide a neat  
graphical user interface which is on par for stuff like changing the  
virtual CD (i.e., avoiding the monitor console) or configuring things.

Slightly similar lately on Mac OS X x86 with VirtualBox as semi-free  
virtualization solution. Unfortunately the Q project made the bad move  
of importing a CVS snapshot of QEMU into their SVN, so you could no  
longer properly work against upstream.

Maybe it's time to rethink the relation between QEMU and its  
frontends / management tools? If we want to compete with the  
commercial products (sic), we might agree on some "official" frontend  
per GUI-centric platform, with a Git-based repository (like qemu- 
kvm.git) and synchronized releases that may call themselves "QEMU",  
linked from qemu.org, rather than having a variety of (outdated) Q*  
frontends per platform of which most are nothing more than a  
configuration window to spawn the regular qemu[-system-x86_64].  
Currently what QEMU can point with is richer machine and hardware  
emulation and its license; if we want more users than that, we'll need  
to deliver what users usually want the most - stability, performance  
and ease of use... and good marketing.

Regards,
Andreas