[Xen-devel] Proposal: deprecate "vncviewer" option in xl domain config file

[Wei Liu <wei.liu2@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all

When I'm working on (de-)serialization of domain configurations I found
"vncviewer". I now propose to deprecate it.

What it does is that if you have it set in your domain's config file and
do "xl create cfg", xl will automatically spawn a vncviewer for you.
This option actually controls the creation process of a domain but has
nothing to do with domain configuration at all.

This option is buggy because it's also saved as part of domain state
when you do save / restore. Consider user migrates a domain to a remote
host, xl will try to auto-spawn vncviewer on the new host. This behavior
doesn't make sense at all.

Further more it becomes an obstacle for the work to (de-)serialization
domain configurations. If we want to preserve this option we then need
to create abstraction for a config file in xl or libxl. This either
introduces lots of work without much benefit (if we add out-of-band
infomation in xl) or pollute libxl public interface.

I propose to deprecate this option.

What I will do is:
1. config file still supports this option but it will prints out a
   warning about its deprecation.
2. this option is not saved as domain state when doing save / restore,
   so when you restore a domain xl will not auto-spawn vncviewer.

This may create a minor regression, but it's in no way critical. In
any case the right way to auto-spawn vncviewer is to use "-V" in "xl
create". And existing user of this config file option can also use "-V"
to work around this regression.

Comments?

Wei.

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