VNC development plan - discuss

[Mark McLoughlin]

On Tue, 2007-03-06 at 10:33 +0100, Adam Tkac wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I did thinking about next development on vnc bits. Fedora 7 has three 
> vnc servers - GNOME's vino, KDE's krfb and headless Xvnc with module to 
> X. I'm not sure that we really need three different vnc servers in 
> distribution. krfb and vino are very simillar. Both of these export real 
> display. I think we could try substitute this two servers by one - for 
> example x11vnc (http://www.karlrunge.com/x11vnc/). x11vnc has more 
> features than actual "real desktop" servers. So two programs could be 
> removed and one added => cost of maintaining and bugfixing could be 
> lower. 

	vino and krfb have different goals and UIs that are designed to be well
integrated into their respective environments. I don't think merging the
two makes any more sense than e.g. merging evolution and kmail because
they both talk the SMTP protocol.

> In next stage we could discuss about standardized RFB protocol 
> library which could be used by all vnc servers in distro. In the end we 
> could have one rfb library which will be used by all servers (and 
> viewers), one real server, one virtual server and X module. What do you 
> think about this idea?

	A common rfb server library would definitely be useful, yes.
libvncserver should be it, but it needs serious re-factoring before we
could ever hope for API/ABI stability.

	Indeed, a common library between vino and krfb could do a lot more -
e.g. the screen scraping and keyboard handling.

Cheers,
Mark.