[Pkg-libvirt-maintainers] Bug#542306: gvncviewer: should add Provides: vnc-viewer to control

[Guido Günther]

On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 01:39:34AM -0500, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Guido Günther wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 03:34:25PM -0700, Alan Ezust wrote:
> 
> >> the control file of the package should indicate it provides vnc-viewer so it can be used with
> >> update-alternatives.
> [...]
> > * Since update-alternatives assumes command line compatibility: I can't
> >   seem to find a list of options that has been agreed upon that all VNC
> >   viewers providing "vnc-viewer" must support
> >
> > * Once this is resolved we can easily add a "Provides: vnc-viewer" and
> >   handle the alternatives.
> >
> > Anybody wants to pick this up?
> 
> Before that, what is the use case?  I.e., what would a script or
> user-run command look like that invokes a vnc-viewer without caring
> which vnc-viewer that is (as many programs open a text editor today)?

Just using vnc-viewer instead of having to remember that it's called
tight-vnc, gvncviewer or similar sound reasonable to me in case you
just want a basic remote display.

> I suppose this would allow QEMU (with its current upstream default
> settings) to launch a vnc viewer instead of just saying
> 
> 	VNC server running on `127.0.0.1:5900'
> 
> on stdout.  It might run
> 
> 	vnc-viewer localhost
> 
> Due to bug#645464, I don't know what a command that specifies the port
> would look like.

--help gives:

gvncviewer [OPTION...] [hostname][:display]

> 
> Is there non-distro-specific common practice we can try to follow
> here?  Maybe something in the libvirt world?  (Sorry, I'm out of
> touch.)

Nothing that I know of.

> 
> Although all I have to contribute is questions at the moment, because
> of the qemu usecase this sounds interesting.

Indeed it would be nice to make virsh directly launch a vnc-viewer
(which would be doable once we have this bug fixed).
Cheers,
 -- Guido