On Sep 24, 2015, at 2:57 AM, Markus Armbruster wrote:

> Programmingkid <programmingk...@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> On Sep 23, 2015, at 4:35 PM, Peter Maydell wrote:
>> 
>>> On 17 September 2015 at 21:17, Programmingkid
>>> <programmingk...@gmail.com> 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 <programmingk...@gmail.com>
>>> 
>>> 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.
> 
> Nobody is challenging the idea that many users appreciate a GUI.
> 
> What we've been trying to tell you is where in this software layer cake
> the GUI should be.  In Peter's words, "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".

That is easy for you to say. Linux already has virt-manager. Mac OS X doesn't. 
Expecting someone to just go and port another program to Mac OS X is 
unreasonable. The amount of time and energy it would take to do so
would make it hard. 

> 
>> This patch can definitely be more simplified. QMP
>> commands could be used in place of C functions. 
>> This would reduce the patch size greatly. 
> 
> You're quite welcome to use QMP the way it wants to be used: as an
> external interface.
> 
> Abusing it as internal interface won't fly.

The QMP interface is primarily there to help a gui interact with QEMU. That
is what I intend to use it for.

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