Re: Binary downloads of QEMU for Mac OS X

[Roman Bolshakov]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 05:07:04PM -0400, G 3 wrote:
> 
> On Jun 22, 2020, at 6:33 AM, Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 22 Jun 2020 at 00:36, G 3 <programmingkidx@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I noticed on the page https://wiki.qemu.org/Hosts/Mac you deleted the
> >> download section. I actually needed qemu-system-i386 today.
> > 
> > Yes; the download links were to random mediafire download URLs
> > (ie not trustable, not something we would want to imply to users
> > that they should be downloading and running) and were also for
> > ancient versions of QEMU (so not being updated or maintained).
> > 
> >> What
> >> would it take to have an office download for QEMU binaries for Mac OS X?
> > 
> > The project doesn't provide binary downloads; this would be
> > a lot of effort for minimal gain. For users who don't want to
> > do a full-compile-from-source we recommend using homebrew
> > (https://www.qemu.org/download/#macos), which is the equivalent
> > for OSX of "get binary packages from your distro" for Linux.
> 
> I don't think this is acceptable for Mac users. We don't do things the
> Linux way. Linux users tend to have to compile their own software due
> to the segmented nature of having over 30 distributions to work with.
> Mac users on the other hand like a more laid back and relaxed
> computing experience. Having to build from source is so not fun. It is
> very difficult and time consuming. A binary download would solve this
> problem. We need binary download for Mac OS X (and Mac OS 11 soon).
> 
> 

Nobody forces to compile QEMU on macOS. Binaries can be installed for
the last three versions of macOS using homebrew. Public stats show that
there is more than 80 thousands of binary installations of QEMU in the
last year:

 https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/qemu#default

Perhaps you may try it - https://brew.sh.

-Roman