Please always CC the mailing list. On 06/06/16 11:58, Rolf Leggewie wrote: > Hello, > > thank you for providing xpra. I've long hoped to be able to have a "GNU > screen for X" and xpra promises to deliver that. I've tried for a few > years from time to time, but sadly xpra never delivered for me as a > user. If I always were compiling the latest upstream from scratch that > might be different. It's not that I can't do this (I'm a Debian > Maintainer), but that I don't run gentoo for a reason. > > I have the impression that xpra is constantly and rapidly evolving > without sufficient concern for long-term stability. This might be fine > if you are only concerned with people compiling from source. But for > distributions you need a horizon of several years. We have an LTS version, supported for years. What downstream decides to use is not up to us. For details, see: http://xpra.org/trac/wiki/Building
> So, here is my story. My first attempt to use xpra was fraught with > severe stability issues as reported in > https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/bugs/1159871. I was running the > latest long-term support, stable release of Ubuntu at the time which had > been released less than a year prior. Nonetheless, I was told by the > Debian maintainer that I was using a "very old version of xpra". The > problem itself wasn't looked into. At the time, xpra was very young at > version 0.0.7 and that might be excusable. I backported the package > from unstable, the problem remained and was still not looked into. Fixed link: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xpra/+bug/1159871 This ticket contains a number of issues, most of which I remember fixing a long time ago. The proxy-start one just looks wrong though. Things that aren't reported upstream may not get fixed in a timely manner. > After several years, I tried again. Of course, I am still running LTS > because I have other things to do than having a constant headache about > random bleeding edge software bringing my computer down and consuming my > time. I'm sure you understand. I connected from a fully updated Ubuntu > trusty machine to an equally fully updated Raspbian Jessie machine. The > Raspbian machine would go to 100% CPU for the xpra process on the > simplest of tasks like hitting enter in xterm which I reported as a bug > to Debian. The ticket was closed immediately as "you are using ancient, > unsupported software". IMO, this means xpra should not even be part of > a distribution since it's not supported for the full cycle of a > release. In fact, it's deemed "ancient" shortly after release of a > distro. I don't think this is what you as upstream want. As per above: this is a question for downstream. From our end, we simply do not have the manpower to support those outdated versions. > I did not give up and looked into backporting newer releases again. > Then I found out that you are not releasing the source code for your > binary packages. That's a GPL violation. Please kindly fix that. That's incorrect: every single line of source code and the patches required to workaround Debian quirks (libav, headers, etc) are available for download and documented. See: http://xpra.org/trac/wiki/Building We will not provide all-in-one source bundle archives for every combination of version and distro out there. Nobody does, and this is not required by the GPL either. > What's more troublesome and the strongest motivator for this mail is > that apparently you broke backward compatibility without documenting it > and generally giving it much concern. As you can see in > https://bugs.debian.org/805751 and > https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1589336 apparently there is xpra 0.15.0 > and later versus prior versions. Those two camps cannot talk to each > other, period. The prior versions include fairly recent stable releases > of Debian and Ubuntu. If there is something you can do now to have > these two groups talking to each other again, that would be fantastic. Again, IIRC, this bug was fixed a long time ago. I doubt this is still a problem with any supported version. That said, most of the testing is done using the python client with rencode (except the HTML5 client which uses bencode) - so issues like this one may go unnoticed from time to time. Again, we don't have the manpower to test every combination of every supported version and every distro + architecture out there (each with different combinations of installed recommends / suggests dependencies). > At the very minimum, xpra should emit an error message if the opposite > end is older and incompatible. It does already. This is something else. > Last, apparently you forgot to include python-rencode as a depends in > your binary packages, even though that doesn't fully prevent problems > related to it. python-rencode is a hard dependency since v0.15.x which dropped support for older distros. It isn't a hard dependency in v0.14.x and earlier because many of the older distros do not have python-rencode at all, and xpra still works fine without it, just a little bit more slowly. > Once again, thank you for your work on xpra. Cheers Antoine > > Regards > > Rolf Leggewie > _______________________________________________ shifter-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.devloop.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/shifter-users
