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

[Anthony Liguori]

On Feb 19, 2012 7:50 PM, "Roy Tam" <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> 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.

7MB is far from huge.  Having to deal with a few dlls doesn't seem like much of a burden to me.

>
> >
> > 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)

Considering that you probably cannot even buy a USB stick smaller than 32MB today, I don't see the logic here.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> >
> >> (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
> >
> >