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

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Thu, Sep 02, 2021 at 12:51:02PM +0200, Thomas Huth wrote:
> 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.

There's also the elephant in the room "-vnc" which has never been mapped
into -display, but which is also one of the most widely used options for
display backends :-(

Regards,
Daniel
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