Peter Maydell <peter.mayd...@linaro.org> writes: > On 30 September 2015 at 09:14, Dr. David Alan Gilbert > <dgilb...@redhat.com> wrote: >> * Markus Armbruster (arm...@redhat.com) wrote: >>> In my opinion, QEMU should leave them to separate GUI shells, because >>> doing everything in QEMU distracts from our core mission and we don't >>> have GUI expertise[*]. One more point: building in the GUI is >>> problematic when you don't trust the guest, because then you really want >>> to run QEMU with least privileges. >> >> Given that we have a built in GUI then I can see people wanting to expand >> it. > > Right, but where do you draw the line? We clearly don't have the > active maintainer and review capacity to do anything serious with > "ui/" (MAINTAINERS lists everything except SPICE as Odd Fixes). > > This is why I tend to agree with Markus' opinion here: we should > provide enough graphical UI to make raw QEMU minimally usable, > and leave further user-friendliness to other projects which have > more direct interest in that. > > If we had more regular contributors who were actively interested > in improving our UI layer my opinion might be different.
Or not. QEMU is a large project. We can do what we do only because we managed to set up a workable hierarchy of maintainers. Still, adding more subsystems is not free. Not even if they come with ready-made, capable maintainers. I'd rather spend our limited complexity credits on our core mission. If people come to us with a new target and a commitment to maintain it, we don't want to say no. That's because targets are core. If people come to us to make QEMU compete with GUI-providing projects sitting on top of QEMU, I want us to say no.
