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

[Markus Armbruster]

Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> writes:

> 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 :-(

There's -display vnc=...  Option -help shows it, -display help doesn't,
but that's just a bug, I guess.  More serious: -display '{"type": "vnc",
...} isn't implemented.