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“This version of XScreenSaver is very old. Please upgrade”

bugs.debian.org

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Re: “This version of XScreenSaver is very old. Please upgrade”

#31

Post by zanny »

I don't (ever) link my own psychotic blog rants on HN (not because I value anything close to a reputation, but because I don't want to inflict my stupid on others) but I wasted an hour last evening on an exceedingly long tirade fairly congruent with this debacle.[1]

On topic though, nobody wants to develop the way distributions want you to - basically maintain branches of every release you make for the lifetime of the distros where you backport bug fixes but not feature additions. Very little software, even libraries, is ever developed like that, and it is part of the reason why Linux desktops are a Mess™. And practically, you often cannot even do this. Your feature additions will optimize code that your bug fixes interact with, and trying to keep them separate is an exercise in masochism.

The TLDR answer is the sooner we can get a community software repo with open signups that developers push new releases to that supports appstream / xdg-app infrastructure the better. Distributions can still freeze the world and maintain all the stability they want, but we need to also let developers take responsibility for their own software on desktop releases.

https://zannyland.wordpress.com/2016/04/02/software-rants-23...

Re: “This version of XScreenSaver is very old. Please upgrade”

#32

Post by qplex »

jarcane wrote: post #23

Frankly, this is a very good example why I inevitably give up on using Debian. It is not the software writers' fault that your distro can't be arsed to keep its package system up-to-date. Even the unstable branch is routinely multiple versions behind on software. The idea of linking end-user software versioning to the operating system version itself was always a dumb idea, but has become even more absurd over time. N…

It's called 'unstable' for a reason. New stuff breaks. Often.

Re: “This version of XScreenSaver is very old. Please upgrade”

#33

Post by cstrahan »

I would recommend looking at NixOS. We're not perfect either, but we generally do a much better job at keeping our shit up to date:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/misc/scree...

If there's something you need that's outdated, a fix is as trivial as opening an issue on GitHub, or sending a Pull Request with the revision and SHA256 bumped.

Re: “This version of XScreenSaver is very old. Please upgrade”

#34

Post by haddr »

sanbor wrote: post #30
jarcane wrote: post #23

Frankly, this is a very good example why I inevitably give up on using Debian. It is not the software writers' fault that your distro can't be arsed to keep its package system up-to-date. Even the unstable branch is routinely multiple versions behind on software. The idea of linking end-user software versioning to the operating system version itself was always a dumb idea, but has become even more absurd over time. N…

Maybe distros like Debian are more stability/security oriented than feature oriented. New version of software often contain new features that it may introduce new bugs. Debian guarantees that when you install their distro things are going to work and are kind of secure. The tradeoff of having all the software in the distro being checked by people that have tested and checked that everything works well and smooth it's…

Spot on. I was always puzzled why some software just can't come statically compiled. I suppose not all apps can be distributed like that, but most of them can.

I can't even remember how many hours I wasted on trying to compile a new version of some program, just to learn the infinite tree of dependencies, newer versions of existing libraries required, build prefixes tweaking etc... Most of that time could have been saved.

Re: “This version of XScreenSaver is very old. Please upgrade”

#35

Post by _delirium »

zanny wrote: post #31

I don't (ever) link my own psychotic blog rants on HN (not because I value anything close to a reputation, but because I don't want to inflict my stupid on others) but I wasted an hour last evening on an exceedingly long tirade fairly congruent with this debacle.[1] On topic though, nobody wants to develop the way distributions want you to - basically maintain branches of every release you make for the lifetime of th…

jwz here seems to be arguing that distros shouldn't be allowed to freeze his software, even if they do it themselves and maintain the branch themselves. He wants only current versions of his software shipped, and old versions disabled once they reach a certain age. I don't think this is an entirely reasonable demand, at least for open-source software.

Re: “This version of XScreenSaver is very old. Please upgrade”

#36

Post by maxerickson »

bpchaps wrote: post #29

Man, it's really weird to see this after just installing Debian after using arch for about a year. And sure enough, that message popped up, I tried to update it and the repos were outdated. Brother.. My worst experience with their repos was with logstash having a bug where it would annoyingly install logstash-web with an auto-start. But..... the package had a typo in its startup script and caused the JVM to restart o…

I've only been using Arch for a few months, but my mental model of AUR is that I shouldn't expect anything to work.

(this isn't out of frustration, I read early on that it was for sharing preliminary packages and discarded all expectations)

Re: “This version of XScreenSaver is very old. Please upgrade”

#37

Post by _delirium »

protomyth wrote: post #17

I'm more on the BSD-side, so can someone give an explanation on why bug fixes are not being back ported? I understand long term stable, but I thought that was more an API thing.

There's no policy against backporting bugfixes, it just doesn't always happen due to lack of developers. If upstream doesn't provide backported bugfixes, it requires someone else to volunteer the time/resources to do it. For some packages, companies sponsor long-term maintenance branches, or particularly interested volunteers take it upon themselves to do it. For other packages, nobody steps up to do the work, so it doesn't happen.

I've found BSD ports pretty similar (mainly pkgsrc is the one I use). Some are very actively maintained, and others are much less actively maintained. Resources are limited, so pkgsrc maintenance happens only to the extent that someone makes it happen.

Re: “This version of XScreenSaver is very old. Please upgrade”

#38

Post by [deleted] »

sp332 wrote: post #16
captainmuon wrote: post #9

After skimming the thread, I'm tempted to say: tell jwz "tough luck" and keep xscreensaver, with the message patched out, just out of spite. After all, he put it under a permissive license, so he should not be surprised that people actually use that license to do whatever they want.

He admits as much in the post, so you don't really have any cause for spite. Respecting his request would improve everyone's experience.

[deleted]

Re: “This version of XScreenSaver is very old. Please upgrade”

#39

Post by digi_owl »

zanny wrote: post #31

I don't (ever) link my own psychotic blog rants on HN (not because I value anything close to a reputation, but because I don't want to inflict my stupid on others) but I wasted an hour last evening on an exceedingly long tirade fairly congruent with this debacle.[1] On topic though, nobody wants to develop the way distributions want you to - basically maintain branches of every release you make for the lifetime of th…

Having used Gobolinux for some years now, i find the xdg-app thinking a case of shooting twee twee birds with AA guns.

*nix already have a mechanism called soname in place that allow versioned libs to live side by side. Gobolinux makes good use of it, along with symlinking, to allow multiple versions to be installed side by side.

You find similar, tho more elaborate, systems in place in NixOS/Guix.

xdg-app on the other hand comes out of the RPM/DEB camp, where there can only be one canonical version of every package installed at any one time. So to get around that they device a system where you basically build a new system for each and every "package".

What that effectively does is replacing dependency "hell" for dll hell (hello Windows).

Re: “This version of XScreenSaver is very old. Please upgrade”

#40

Post by maxerickson »

_delirium wrote: post #35
zanny wrote: post #31

I don't (ever) link my own psychotic blog rants on HN (not because I value anything close to a reputation, but because I don't want to inflict my stupid on others) but I wasted an hour last evening on an exceedingly long tirade fairly congruent with this debacle.[1] On topic though, nobody wants to develop the way distributions want you to - basically maintain branches of every release you make for the lifetime of th…

jwz here seems to be arguing that distros shouldn't be allowed to freeze his software, even if they do it themselves and maintain the branch themselves. He wants only current versions of his software shipped, and old versions disabled once they reach a certain age. I don't think this is an entirely reasonable demand, at least for open-source software.

More charitably, he thinks the distro choice to freeze something should result in 0 headaches for him.

The idea that the freeze should be done without carefully taking responsibility for it is probably a pretty stupid norm, so I can understand the lack of patience.

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