From: Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com>
To: "Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>
Cc: 57068@debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#57068: Resizing mcron job in vm-image.tmpl interferes with settings
Date: Tue, 09 Aug 2022 21:14:29 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87v8r0nbm2.fsf@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87r11p932e.fsf@inria.fr> ("Ludovic Courtès"'s message of "Tue, 09 Aug 2022 11:30:33 +0200")
Hi Ludovic,
Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
> Hello!
>
> Commit 945ad48cd8029fa77a643e00c7fd350e98cacca0 added an mcron job to
> ‘vm-image.tmpl’ that resets screen size every second. I’m don’t fully
> understand the problem this was addressing, but it has two drawbacks:
The vm-image.tmpl is the template we use for our graphical Guix demo
QEMU image that can be downloaded from our site
(https://guix.gnu.org/en/download/ ->
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guix/guix-system-vm-image-1.3.0.x86_64-linux.qcow2).
This commit was made to allow SPICE dynamic resizing to work, as
mentioned in a comment part of this commit. XFCE lacks support for it,
as also mentioned in the comment
(https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-settings/-/issues/142), which means
a new user downloading the image and running it in a SPICE-capable
viewer such as virt-manager or gnome-boxes will be dismayed that it
doesn't resize as they may have come to expect from other modern
distributions.
> 1. Kicking in every second is inefficient.
5% on my machine, as mentioned in the commit message. The trade is
still on the winning side for me (dynamic resizing is a big upgrade for
the user experience in my book).
> 2. Resetting the screen size prevents users from changing it. For
> example, if I run:
>
> $(guix system vm gnu/system/examples/vm-image.tmpl) -m 1024
>
> then go to the Xfce menu, Settings -> Display, and change the screen
> size, I have it immediately reset back to the default value.
OK. I didn't know this could be workable use case with the stock QEMU
viewer when playing with graphical VMs.
> Should we remove this workaround, possibly finding another one?
I think we should use a desktop environment that is better maintained,
and which works well with SPICE, without hacks, given the improvements
to the user experience it provides, and given it's important that a
first user encounter with Guix be smooth and shiny. GNOME could do it,
at the cost of a bigger image size.
There are other, perhaps worst issues with XFCE, which is that the
keyboard layout switcher doesn't work, and it didn't seem trivial to fix
when I looked at it.
What do you think?
Thanks,
Maxim
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2022-08-10 1:15 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 9+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2022-08-09 9:30 bug#57068: Resizing mcron job in vm-image.tmpl interferes with settings Ludovic Courtès
2022-08-09 9:47 ` Ludovic Courtès
2022-08-10 4:46 ` Maxim Cournoyer
2022-08-11 10:30 ` Ludovic Courtès
2022-08-10 1:14 ` Maxim Cournoyer [this message]
2022-08-11 10:36 ` Ludovic Courtès
2022-11-01 17:40 ` Mathieu Othacehe
2022-11-03 14:59 ` Ludovic Courtès
2023-12-30 5:35 ` Maxim Cournoyer
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
List information: https://guix.gnu.org/
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=87v8r0nbm2.fsf@gmail.com \
--to=maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com \
--cc=57068@debbugs.gnu.org \
--cc=ludo@gnu.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
Code repositories for project(s) associated with this public inbox
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).