Re: [PATCH v2 3/3] softmmu/vl: Deprecate the -sdl and -curses option

[Thomas Huth]

On 31/08/2021 15.53, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> As an alternative, you may want to turn it into "-display sdl" rather than 
> poke at dpy. This isn't much more code, but it keeps the shortcut isolated 
> within a single "case". This follows a lot of recently cleaned up command 
> line parsing code such as -no-hpet, -enable-kvm, -smp etc.
>
> In the end (spoiler alert for my upcoming KVM Forum presentation—slides are 
> already on sched.com <http://sched.com> :)) what really produces complexity 
> is the lack of isolation/modularity. As long as UI code doesn't care about 
> command line parsing, and command line parsing doesn't care about global 
> variables from all over the place, the cost of shortcuts is so small that it 
> may tilt in favor of keeping them.

Honestly, I'd rather like to see them removed in the end. Our user interface 
is so terribly inconsistent here that I think that these options are rather 
confusing for the users than helpful. For example, why do we have -sdl and 
-curses, but no -gtk ? And as a normal user, I'd also always wonder what's 
the difference between "-display sdl" and "-sdl", since the difference in 
the amount of characters that you have to type here is not that much that it 
justifies the shortcut option. So IMHO let's rather clean this up completely 
than dragging the shortcut options along forever.

 Thomas