Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v3] ui/cocoa.m: Add Mount image file menu item

[Programmingkid]

On Sep 23, 2015, at 4:35 PM, Peter Maydell wrote:

> On 17 September 2015 at 21:17, Programmingkid <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Add "Mount Image File..." and a "Eject Image File" menu items to
>> cocoa interface. This patch makes sharing files between the
>> host and the guest user-friendly.
>> 
>> The "Mount Image File..." menu item displays a dialog box having the
>> user pick an image file to use in QEMU. The image file is setup as
>> a USB flash drive. The user can do the equivalent of removing the
>> flash drive by selecting the file in the "Eject Image File" submenu.
>> 
>> Signed-off-by: John Arbuckle <address@hidden>
> 
> I've thought a bit about this, and I really don't think this sort
> of feature should be part of QEMU itself. Our general design for
> how QEMU does this sort of thing is that an external program
> (virt-manager, for instance) is responsible for providing most
> of the UI conveniences the user wants, and QEMU's "ui" code is
> a fairly simple minimum-functionality affair. I agree with Markus
> that this separation of concerns has generally worked OK for us.
> 
> I don't think OSX should be an exception to this design model:
> (a) being an odd special case is never a good idea
> (b) as a practical matter, I'm the only person who really reviews
> OSX patches, and I don't have either the time nor the UI or OSX
> expertise to deal with maintaining what will effectively be a
> vm-manager grafted onto the side of QEMU
> 
> So I think your efforts would be better spent in either porting
> one of the Linux frontends like libvirt/virt-manager, or in
> writing a custom OSX specific frontend.

I understand that time is precious. It is one of those things
that we only have a finite amount of. Every user can agree
to that. This patch was pretty hairy looking with the QDict
and other unfamiliar code. With that said I'm not ready to
give up on this patch. It is a huge time saver for the user.
Without it, the user would need to spend a lot of time
investigating documentation. What's worse is the user
would have to type out full paths to files they need. This
would definitely be error prone and frustrating.

This patch can definitely be more simplified. QMP
commands could be used in place of C functions. 
This would reduce the patch size greatly.