vnc @4.1.3 misleading description

[ianroberts (Ian Roberts)]

The Portfile for the vnc port describes itself thus:

Creates a virtual X11 windowing environment that can be viewed not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures.

This is not true - the package provides only the VNC viewer, not the Xvnc server suggested by the phrase "virtual X11 windowing environment". A better description would be something like

X11-based client for connecting to remote desktops using the VNC protocol.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

It looks like the vnc port provides both a server and a client and other related utilities:

% port contents vnc | grep bin/
  /opt/local/bin/vncconfig
  /opt/local/bin/vncpasswd
  /opt/local/bin/vncviewer
  /opt/local/bin/x0vncserver

Similarly, although the tightvnc port's description doesn't indicate, it provides both client and server—unless the no_server variant is used. This port obviously hasn't been touched in forever; variant names beginning with no_ have been out of favor for at least 15 years. It also doesn't build; see #62636.

tigervnc's description also doesn't say whether it provides a client or server. (It provides a client.)

Often we base our port descriptions on wording from the project's web page or readme. I don't know if that's the case for these ports.

Improvements are of course welcome and can be submitted as pull requests.

[ianroberts (Ian Roberts)]

x0vncserver is not a virtual X server, it's a tool that talks to another X server in a tight polling loop and "echoes" what it sees to VNC clients. It requires that you already have another X server running somewhere else which is what your X windows applications display on.

(The background here is that there's an issue in the XQuartz X11 server for Mac - ​https://github.com/XQuartz/XQuartz/issues/31 - whereby the window backgrounds go completely black and unreadable when running on Apple Silicon. I thought a workaround might be if I could get the typical Linux-style Xvnc virtual X server running, then connect to that using the built-in Mac VNC client, and the port description made it appear this would be possible with MacPorts).

I'll see if I can come up with better wording for the portfile.