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

[Jonathan Nieder]

Guido Günther wrote:

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

I guess display == port - 5900.

> On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 01:39:34AM -0500, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

>> 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.

Right, it seems virt-manager uses python-gtk-vnc directly.

>> 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).

One way is to imitate the history of the EDITOR variable and "editor"
command.

 1. Hardcode gvncviewer.
 2. Some users might want something different and introduce a patch
    to respect a VNCVIEWER envvar that gives them a choice.
 3. Some people building from source might want a different default
    VNCVIEWER, so they can introduce a patch to make it configurable
    at compile time.
 4. Distro integrators notice there is no one right answer for the
    compile-time setting and use update-alternatives to abstract it
    away.
 5. xdg-utils gains an xdg-vncviewer command to handle running
    ${VNCVIEWER-vnc-viewer}, making the application-specific logic
    from steps (2) and (3) obsolete.

So there is no need to wait. :)

More seriously, gvncviewer, directvnc, vncviewer from TightVNC,
and vncviewer from RealVNC all seem to support the <host>[:<display>]
syntax.  I guess that is the common interface.

Some also support <host>::<port>.

gtkvncviewer does not accept a server name on the command line.