On 18.05.2010, at 00:54, Anthony Liguori wrote: > On 05/17/2010 05:49 PM, Alexander Graf wrote: >>>> Then we could still offer a separate SDL based viewer that could do the >>>> same things it does now. But we'd also open up the gate for a whole new >>>> integration level with possible GUIs. >>>> >>>> >>> You could, but I think it introduces more complexity which just is going to >>> get in the way of building a good GUI. >>> >> The main benefit I see by taking an always-vnc approach would be that >> everything becomes 100% networkable. There's nothing getting in your way >> because you're doing things on a remote machine. And you even get the same >> look&feel you got from the local connection because it's the same tool >> connecting you. >> > > My current thinking with GUIs is that network transparency is more trouble > than it's worth. > > The problem is, simple things end up being overly complicated. You can't > just pop up a file dialog box to select a new CD-ROM ISO because you can't > browse files on a remote machine. Instead, you need to have something like a > "pool" concept or something like that.
Yeah - VMware solved that by showing you a dialog with the remote file system. Pretty ugly. Another solution to that would be to only enable the dialog box when target == localhost. As soon as we look at server workloads, we do need to have network transparency. But I guess most of this talk is moot anyways, since we have VNC now. So if there is someone willing to take up on a GUI, he can just do so the same as he could with a unified backend. Alex
