A good maintainer has to strike a balance between asking more of people
than what they initially volunteer and getting people to implement the
less fun things that are nonetheless required. The kernel can take this
to an extreme because at the end of the day, it's the only game in town
and there is an unending number of potential volunteers. Most other
projects are not quite as fortunate.
When someone submits a patch set to QEMU implementing a new network
backend for raw sockets, we can push back about how it fits into the
entire stack wrt security, usability, etc. Ultimately, we can arrive at
a different, more user friendly solution (networking helpers) and along
with some time investment on my part, we can create a much nicer, more
user friendly solution. Still command line based though.
Responding to such a patch set with, replace the SDL front end with a
GTK one that lets you graphically configure networking, is not
reasonable and the result would be one less QEMU contributor in the long
run.
Overtime, we can, and are, pushing people to focus more on usability.
But that doesn't get you a first class GTK GUI overnight. The only way
you're going to get that is by having a contributor be specifically
interesting in building such a thing.
We simply haven't had that in the past 5 years that I've been involved
in the project. If someone stepped up to build this, I'd certainly
support it in every way possible and there are probably some steps we
could take to even further encourage this.
Regards,
Anthony Liguori
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