[virt-tools-list] RFC: virt-manager UI philosophy draft

[Andrea Bolognani]

On Fri, 2019-06-21 at 18:13 -0400, Cole Robinson wrote:
> On 6/20/19 9:58 AM, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
> > I'm obviously biased here, since a big part of what I do is caring
> > about non-x86 architectures :) but I would consider any application
> > that doesn't have proper multi-architecture support as a core
> > principle to be inherently flawed, so having to spell this out at
> > all seems backwards.
> 
> For most cases like a C library, I agree. But this a bit different
> though, apps need to hardcode some knowledge about every non-x86 arch in
> order to generate a working config. Things have unified a _lot_ over the
> past few years, but there's still the issue that say spice isn't
> available on PPC64 hosts, that aarch64 requires UEFI to be able to use
> traditional install methods where x86 doesn't, that some archs need an
> explicit non-default machine type like 'virt' while others can get away
> with the default. If someone wrote a new virt-manager tomorrow I
> wouldn't begrudge them ignoring non-x86 until someone with hardware
> showed up with patches or offered to help.

I would! In fact, even more so now that libvirt and virt-install have
seen significant improvements to their multi-arch support: if you
wanted to create a new virt-manager it would have to be at least as
good as the existing one, not worse! :)

> > Now if you were talking about the ability to create non-x86 guests
> > on x86 through the use of TCG, then I absolutely agree that it's an
> > advanced feature mostly interesting to developers. But being able
> > to create and managing non-x86 KVM guests on a non-x86 host should
> > be as vital to virt-manager as doing the same on x86.
> 
> I understand the sentiment. But the general point of this exercise to
> rank some kind of priority or importance. My perception is that using
> virt-manager for non-x86 is low single digit percent usage of the app,
> and that most of those users are highly technical people to begin with,
> using virt as part of a development environment and not for desktopy use
> cases. And I suspect most of those if they are using it are managing
> virt on a remote non-x86 host anyways, which also puts it into
> non-beginner territory IMO.

That's a fair point, and seeing the above I guess having it spelled
out in the "intermediate users" section is actually better than not
mentioning it at all, lest anyone forgets about it O:-)

-- 
Andrea Bolognani / Red Hat / Virtualization