[vbox-dev] [PATCH] VDE native support for VirtualBox v0.1

[Renzo Davoli]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 10:46:11AM +0200, Klaus Espenlaub wrote:
> I disagree. Having entries which 98% of the user base will never use and  
> probably even more will never understand is bad UI design. If we'd  
> squeeze everything into the GUI "just because it's not _that_ heavy"  
> we'd end up being as unusable as the qemu GUI wrappers.

I am still supporting the idea to have vde in the GUI. It is the last
item of a pull down menu, it is rare to use it by mistake.
Non expert users do not select what they don't know.
A menu item "VDE Adapter" is far less scaring than all the options included in
the GUI hidden under the "Advanced" checkbox in the network configuration 
panel....

How many (basic) users need to activate para-virtualized networks or change 
the model of the virtual network adapter? IMHO the same 2% or less.

> We have lots of other features which are VBoxManage only (e.g. the  
> medium modes), as they'd just make the GUI harder to understand for the  
> vast majority of our users. Having everything in the GUI mainly  
> increases the possibilities of misconfiguring something by our average  
> user, which (somewhat to my surprise) has quite limited understanding of  
> how a PC works or how networks are configured properly.

VDE is not just a command line set of tools for expert users only.
As an example you can see the Marionnet project.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marionnet
http://www.marionnet.org/
Marionnet users set up and run complex, distributed sets of VM just by drawing
the topology.

By Leaving the VDE configuration outside the GUI you are just making the 
life harder for Marionnet designers when and if they will consider to use 
VirtualBox_OSE along with (or instead of) User-Mode Linux. 
This applies also to all the other projects that want
to create infrastructures for (basic) users based on VirtualBox and VDE.

These are potential VirtualBox users.

renzo