27.12.2023 06:55, Brian Sammon :
I fear that my bug report has sounded like a criticism or an argument. I apologize for that.
Nope, I haven't interpreted your report as a criticism or argument (and I've nothing at all against a criticism either).
Let me try to further describe my dilemma. I want to use qemu. I read the description of qemu-system-arm, and I believe that is a package that I want to use. The packager of qemu-system-arm appears to believe that I should use qemu-system-gui, since qemu-system-arm "recommends" qemu-system-gui. I've looked into qemu-system-gui, and I can't figure out what it does. Is it a VM-launcher app? Something else? Now I agree that I shouldn't be using a package that I don't understand. So how do I learn what qemu-system-gui is, so I can decide whether to follow the recommendation of qemu-system-arm and use it? If I can't understand what qemu-system-gui is, does that mean that I'm better off using qemu without qemu-system-gui?
Let's use another example. qemu-system-arm recommends (or suggests, don't remember anymore, but let's assume it is Recommends) samba. The reason is that qemu can use samba in certain mode to share a directory on the host to the guest system it is running. Does this mean samba should carry a README explaining how it is used with qemu-system-arm? If qemu-system-gui package is already installed you can just look at the list of files contained in it, - the list gives a good hint. It should, - I hope anyway - be enough to read the description already. At the very least, almost no one looks at READMEs inside packages, but some do look at the descriptions, especially before installing something. Maybe the description should be improved a bit. Your question comes from the lack of understanding what qemu itself is and how to use it. https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/invocation.html#hxtool-3 is the part relevant to this context - qemu-system-gui provides sdl and gtk *modules* for qemu-system-* packages (and this is obvious from the list of files in the package). And no, I don't know how to use gui with qemu-system-arm. Many arm boards don't have standard VGA devices. /mjt
