[libvirt] Got time to try out the libvirt 0.8.6 win32 package?

[Matthias Bolte]

2010/12/13 Justin Clift <jclift at redhat.com>:
> On 14/12/2010, at 3:38 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>> This raises the question of how the tools depending on libvirt
>> will be distributed. eg virt-viewer.  If they're separate, then
>> we need to make sure the tools continue working, after any update
>> of libvirt without changing paths manually.
>>
>> IMHO, rather than just distributing a libvirt installer, we should
>> distribute a 'virt tools' installer on virt-tools.org which has
>> a complete bundle of everything that has been ported to Win32,
>> libvirt core, language bindings and apps. The installer would of
>> course allow you to pick & choose which bits to install.
>
> Yeah, that's not a bad idea too.
>
> One of the interesting things that turned up from this exercise
> so far, is that having a shortcut to virsh.exe in the windows
> install menu doesn't work (tried it).  Virsh (on windows) needs
> to be given a connection string in order to do anything.  Without
> it, it just displays an error message then exits.

That's because autodetection for the URI doesn't work with remote
drivers only. You cannot guess the server name.

> Using a shortcut at the moment means the user sees a black
> dos prompt screen show up for a fraction of a second (not long
> enough to read the text) then disappear.  Not real practical, so
> disabled the shortcut creation.
>
> Thinking what we'd probably want to do for virsh is have a
> dialog or something that lets the user assemble a connection
> string, then launches virsh using that.  Someone probably has
> a better idea than that though. :)
>

Well, you can do that with a simple batch file:

@echo off
set /p uri="Enter libvirt connection URI: "
virsh.exe -c %uri%
pause

Put that in a virsh-launcher.bat in the same directory as virsh.exe
and link to it.

The set /p command outputs the prompt string and lets the user input a
line of text and assigns it to the uri variable. The pause at the end
stops the command window from closing automatically when virsh exits.

You might add some informative output before the set /p using echo.

Matthias