I would like Debian to stop shipping XScreenSaver

[arochester]

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-woul ... reensaver/

[sgosnell]

There's still a screensaver? Who knew? Who cares?

[stevepusser]

We should get together and get him a present to soothe his hurt feelings:

[arochester]

One thing that amazes me is the number of comments which this has attracted.

I wonder how it can be such a live issue?

[stevepusser]

Still a just first world problem. It pretty much pales in comparison to those facing privation and death in less fortunate countries.

"My leg has been blown off by a mine!"

"Oh yeah? My screensaver is nagging me about it being too old!"

"Wow. OK, you win."

Said no one ever.

[dilberts_left_nut]

It should simply be patched to remove the undesirable behaviour, and/or forked if required for political reasons.

His reasoning is retarded and ignoring direct bug reports on old versions (how many really?) is his remedy.

Imagine if every upstream put "old nags" in their code - a stable release would be full of stupid (and pointless) popups.

[Innovate]

Is that even consider as "bug report"?
Sometimes it's even "selfish feature request" rather be call bug report.

[spacex]

Nah, but Debian should get a newer version of "xscreensaver" and "xscreensaver-data" into stable, so that people don't get the outdated warnings anymore, and the annoying message about our distribution not doing us justice. Besides, the version in Testing are better, as in better screensavers. Obviously I have fixed it for myself, picked them directly from testing as all the dependencies are covered in Stable. That's the easy way to do it, but not the recommended way.

But it works for me, and nah, I have no intention of backporting it for others, because that comes with obligations. Debian should upgrade Stable with the versions from testing. It doesn't make Stable any less stable.

[dilberts_left_nut]

Debian should upgrade Stable with the versions from testing. It doesn't make Stable any less stable.

No they shouldn't and yes it does.
The 'stable' (does not change) policies have been there for a long time and have proven their worth in providing a dependable release.
I see no reason to make exceptions just because upstream wants it - that is one of the important points of free software, you must be free to modify it to suit your use case.
There are certain things that change faster and need special handling (browsers, AV etc.) but this isn't one of them - security fixes are backported to the released version as with everythng else, and the nag code is an artificial obsolescence introduced for ridiculous (and easily handled in other ways) reasons.

[stevepusser]

Nah, but Debian should get a newer version of "xscreensaver" and "xscreensaver-data" into stable, so that people don't get the outdated warnings anymore, and the annoying message about our distribution not doing us justice. Besides, the version in Testing are better, as in better screensavers. Obviously I have fixed it for myself, picked them directly from testing as all the dependencies are covered in Stable. That's the easy way to do it, but not the recommended way.

But it works for me, and nah, I have no intention of backporting it for others, because that comes with obligations. Debian should upgrade Stable with the versions from testing. It doesn't make Stable any less stable.

It's been backported "for others" the first day that it was reported. Piece of cake using the OBS.

Even for Debian 7. http://software.opensuse.org/download.h ... creensaver


Or I could have just patched 5.30 to remove the nag and thrown that into the OBS...

[spacex]

Yes, but it isn't in the jessie-backports, where I would want it, as I don't add any outside repositories. Not even yours.

As for the patch, I strongly disagree doing that, as I'm dead against patching away the warnings. Free software or not, Debian shouldn't go against the developers wishes. Instead, Debian should honor it, and either live with the warnings or remove Xscreensaver all together, and instead use something that honors Debian needs for 24 months.

Debian behaved badly to the developers of Live-Build, and now towards the dev of Xscreensaver. I don't like how Debian handles stuff these days. Way to entitled, pushing good devs away. Change the code? Then fork it, and change the name. That's the only decent approach.

[spacex]

Debian should upgrade Stable with the versions from testing. It doesn't make Stable any less stable.

No they shouldn't and yes it does.
The 'stable' (does not change) policies have been there for a long time and have proven their worth in providing a dependable release.
I see no reason to make exceptions just because upstream wants it - that is one of the important points of free software, you must be free to modify it to suit your use case.
There are certain things that change faster and need special handling (browsers, AV etc.) but this isn't one of them - security fixes are backported to the released version as with everythng else, and the nag code is an artificial obsolescence introduced for ridiculous (and easily handled in other ways) reasons.

Well, that's how it is today, but allow me to disagree with this policy. In my mind, Stable should be kept reasonably stable, but not frozen and dead. In my mind, Stable should get a new definition, as in "not to many bugs", not as in "never going to change". We'll probably disagree about that, and that's fine. But in my mind, Debian should become more current. Not as current as some of the competitors, but more current than today.

[montagdude]

Is it really that much trouble for the developer to simply redirect bug reports about old versions to the maintainers of the various distributions? His method of bug handling seems to be his personal email, so maybe that's the problem if it's causing that much annoyance for him.

[dilberts_left_nut]

Is it really that much trouble for the developer to simply redirect bug reports about old versions to the maintainers of the various distributions? His method of bug handling seems to be his personal email, so maybe that's the problem if it's causing that much annoyance for him.

^^This.
All the handwaving and swearing and bugging end-users with popups most won't know what to do with, then abusing people in the bug report and effectively giving an ultimatum to change the distro's release policy or (please) don't use his code...
Maybe too long spent looking at marching ants and drawing penises on users lockscreens.

[keithpeter]

Quite funny really: jwz is of course famous for his key role in the Netscape -> Mozilla open source transition. He seems to find the *concept* of a stable distribution not changing over a timescale of 2 or 3 years other than for severe security concerns surprisingly difficult to grasp.

With regard to future versions of Debian, again I think you should be
more clear in your license terms. Don't pretend to publish it as free
software, but then use pretty "please", time bombs and cursing to get
users to not use their freedoms.
-- Peter Nowee

I don't know who Peter Nowee is but I think he has a point here. The GPL is the GPL. No 'moral' or other residual rights.