Slock (suckless-tools)
this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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Linux
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Wait? Your xscreensaver is checking for updates / new versions? AFAIK it's not supposed to do that. ... or did you just try to phrase this cynical and it was your package management?
I know, it's hard to believe. The confidence with which it announced that an update is available suggests that the actual screensaver was checking for updates on its own. So far as the system package manager is concerned there isn't one.
I gotta take a look if that's just your old version or every version is doing this. I mean what's next? Sending emails? Push requests? Self updating? If so, it's maybe time for a fork. But maybe it's also a compile time option.
As it turns out, it's just printing that message if more than 510 days have passed since the timestamp in version.h was updated, which it wasn't when the debian maintainers last applied a patch. So I guess it is taken as given that the program will forever continue to need updates that frequently and that those updates will be forthcoming.
Anyway, in keeping with the author's wishes I'll just use xfce4-screensaver instead. It seems fine.
Nice for the paranoid people, but this means false errors when there simply are no updates.
wow. thank you for checking
tl;dr: people use stable distros like debian and then complain to him when they don't get feature bugfixes
This is a daily reminder that "stable" means "unchanging" and in no way refers to the quality of the code. It doesn't mean "won't fall over"... That's a different type of stable which debian stable absolutely does not guarantee.
A bug in debian will remain present in debian until the next update a year from now. If the bug breaks your workflow, then find a new workflow or a new distro.
Exactly. Stable basically means, “you can build your entire workflow around this bug, because we guarantee we won’t be fixing it.”
A lot of people don't know this though. They think it is the "won't fall over" type. They hear "use debian over ubuntu, because it's more stable" or "use debian for servers, because it's more stable" and think it means "You want uptime, so you dont want something crashing". So when they see a bug, it is concerning to them. A distro focused on not falling over must super care about reducing crashes, and don't realize the exact opposite is actually true. The bug was fixed a long time ago, but you don't get it because "don't change" is more important than "don't crash".
If the bug is in a popular package (ie, a super common screensaver) in a very popular distro (and a lot of people have chosen the distro because they think it has less bugs than others), I can imagine the maintainer getting fed up with the bug reports for a bug that was already fixed.
Most people I've seen on Lemmy understands that "stable" means "unchanging"... But every person I've talked to outside of lemmy, thinks it means "less bugs". So clearly it's a very big misunderstanding (Which is basically confirmed by the fact that xscreensaver gets so many invalid bug reports that they felt necessary to do this.)
Old dev angry new dev work not exactly as they want it.
Film at 11.
Wayland does not support screen savers: it does not have any provision that allows screen savers to even exist in any meaningful way. If you value screen savers, that's kind of a problem.
Why doesn't it? Well, I suppose the designers of Wayland ~~have no joy in their cold, black hearts~~ simply do not value screen savers.
They go on to explain that the security model of Wayland is better than X in this regard, yet instead of writing code to improve what they see as deficiencies, they bitch and throw insults.
This is not the way to effect change. Oh, you're being ignored? Maybe try having more emotional maturity than a 12 year old.
I was considering keeping xscreensaver and just blocking any network requests it makes at the firewall, but if jwz is going to be like that I guess it's enough motivation to actually look for a replacement.
If you received constant complaints from users about bugs that you had resolved years ago, but package maintainers refused to package, you'd probably get sick of it too.
Daniel Stenberg (author of curl) has blog posts about how everyone in the world uses curl, and as a result include the curl license in their readme, which means he gets mail from people upset about their car not working.
Steam had a big thing recently because the snap of Steam is not official. But yet, they get a TON of bug reports for things that are only broken in the snap.
I imagine having the same conversation of "That bug is already fixed as of 8 months ago" "Well how do I install the latest release?" "I dunno, talk to your distro about that" on a super regular basis, it starts being something that is incredibly infuriating. No one wants to take the anger of aggressive upset people, especially when the fault lies with someone else. He has asked Debian to stop shipping out of date versions of his software in the past. But because open source, they are not obligated to, so he has very limited ways to protect his own interests.
Your issue sounds like it's with Debian for shipping incredibly out of date software and putting jwz into this position in the first place and not with jwz.
Oh look. Debian changed the keepassxc package and now the keepassxc repo is getting all the bug reports for it. Their stance is "it will go away in a year or so"
Regardless of whether or not it is a good idea, it's undeniable that Debian makes a lot of decisions that negatively impact their upstream. And since it's someone else's problem, oh well.
There is a reason upstream repo maintainers wind up angry about problems that someone else caused.
xfce4-screensaver isn't packaged for debian stable as of yet, but I've built it from source with only minor hacking required to get it to run with the current version of everything else. Problem solved.
Well, if you read some more of jwz's blog posts about the horrible security bugs that others have added while creating derivatives of Xscreensaver you might think twice before doing so. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/01/i-told-you-so-2021-edition For me a screensaver is no longer about trying to prevent dead pixels (or something like that) but being able to safely lock the screen when being away from it for a while.
That's not really the job of a screensaver, though, it's the job of the login or session manager.
(And screensavers were created to prevent burn-in on CRTs, not dead pixels in LCDs.)
Maybe ironically, the dev acutally makes a good case for why Wayland should be the future in that post. (Crashing the screen locker doesn't cause it to display your desktop instead)
In the intervening two years, the various Linux distros have done nothing to address their copyright- and license-infringement issues.
For a guy who’s gotta be at least 20 years older than me (I’m almost 40) he seems kinda naive about how the law works in the real world. Lawyer up or fuck all’s gonna change.
This guy has a strong passion for screensavers, I’ll give him that. His feelings about Wayland were quite the read. Not sure what’s going to end up happening but the Wayland train doesn’t seem like it’s slowing down at all.
Things are moving steadily towards Wayland because Wayland has been steadily improving. In some aspects, it's currently better than X. Valve certainly thinks so because they use Wayland for the Gaming mode on their Steam Deck.
Some people hate change enough that they'll blind themselves to that being their core issue, and instead they'll focus on the imperfect as their argument that things shouldn't change.
Screensavers aren't anywhere near as important as they once were since display tech is different now, so if Wayland devs aren't focusing on them, maybe it's not such a big deal. X11 isn't going to disappear overnight, so if you don't want to use Wayland, then don't!
Screensavers are arguable completely useless, because you can just turn off the screen now. Screensavers were invented when the computer couldn’t control the screen.
Maybe not as important, but I still like having a fancy futuristic animation when a device is locked and idle.
I hope Wayland gets screensaver support at some point.
Absolutely. I still miss my After Dark screensavers from Windows 3.1. They can be fun and add a lot of character to a desktop computer.
I hope it gets support too. X didn't get all its features overnight, and Wayland won't either.