[7598] in SIPB bug reports
Re: xscreensaver conflict with default dotfiles
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Fri Jun 16 12:50:31 2000
Message-Id: <200006161650.MAA02190@contents-vnder-pressvre.mit.edu>
To: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bug-sipb@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 16 Jun 2000 12:30:17 EDT."
<200006161630.MAA07483@small-gods.mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2000 12:50:28 -0400
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
In message <200006161630.MAA07483@small-gods.mit.edu>, Greg Hudson writes:
>jhawk, if you want me to take your objections seriously, make real
>alternative proposals which will satisfy the constraints.
Before attempting to do so, I'm attempting to understand the
constraints. I'm also letting you know that I find the proposal to be
distasteful. I think those are both reasonable things.
>You are the one who pushed fuzzballs to decide to turn the
>screensaver on by default.
I encouraged that, yes. I don't see how that is relvent.
>As the developer who has to implement your proposal while avoiding
>catastrophes, I find it highly obnoxious that you've objected to my
>proposed implementation because it's not perfect, but have not
>presented a better solution.
I find your use of the word "obnoxious" (modified by the adjective
"highly"!) here to be personally offensive to me. I do not think that
my reply to you was "reprehensible" or "deserving of censure," nor
"odious" or "hateful." If you truly meant those definitions of
"obnoxious," then I apologize to you and request further clarification
as to your substance of your objection(s), because they are unclear to
me. Contrariwise, if you did not mean those definitions, I would ask
that you supply the definition you were using so we can hold this
discussion on a common semantic ground, or that you strongly
reconsider your use of the word "obnoxious" in the future.
It seems to be reasonable to point out the faults in a scheme prior to
proposing a solution. I might not have done so in direct email to you
(as the requestor) if you had not been in the position of overlapping
between bug-sipb and releng/Athena. I can see no problems in raising
my objections on bug-sipb, however. Again, if you can, I would like to
better understand what is driving your opinions, because it is grossly
unclear to me.
All the king's horses and all the king's men out of the way, then:
>gnome wants jwz's xscreensaver to be installed, and expects it to be
>named "xscreensaver." This is hardcoded in many places, leading to a
>raft of local hacks we have to make to gnome to get it to work
>properly.
This seems like a clear problem in gnome, if it expects a specific
screensaver and is not configurable. I suppose that it may not be
worth the development effort to try to fix this?
That the case, I am not sure it would not be best to have
/usr/athena/bin/xscreensaver (or perhaps even
/usr/athena/gnome-bin/xscreensaver -- a path used only by gnome)
in addition to /mit/sipb/bin/xscreensaver, even if they are different
programs.
At first evaluation, it would seem less painful. On the flipside,
there's certainly an issue of transition costs versus recurring costs,
and the above proposal of mine would have recurring cost.
>I don't expect we'd ever desupport the xss names.
Ah.
>> I don't see a discussion of this in the fuzzballs discuss meeting.
>
>I don't attend fuzzballs any more. I was informed by either wdc or
>jweiss in release-team that fuzzballs had decided to approve your
>idea. fuzzballs did not decide on an implementation; that's the
>release team's domain.
I had the impression from your message the fuzzballs had recommended
that sipb change the xscreensaver name. Upon re-reading, I do not
see that. Rather:
[The Athena release team] [are] finding that having
renamed xscreensaver to xss makes gnome kind of
unhappy, and we'd like to take the xscreensaver name in
8.5 or so.
Indeed, I see reference in release-77[2304] (section quoted here verbatim
for bug-sipb's benefit):
| 5. xss running by default
|
| We would like to make xss run by default. There are three problems:
|
| * People who run xss in their dotfiles will get an error
| message which is difficult to decipher.
|
| * The current implementation of xss-button will not work for
| an already running xss.
|
| * People who use the SIPB xscreensaver could get dueling
| screensavers.
|
| The first problem is unfortunate but not fatal, and probably doesn't
| bite too many users. And it's difficult to do anything about. We
| will live with that.
|
| We have to fix the second and third problems before we can make the
| change. Greg will hopefully fix xss-button this week. For the third
| problem, we will attempt to convince the SIPB locker maintainers to
| make xscreensaver a script on all platforms (at least at the 8.4
| version), so people will have to run xscreensaver.real or something to
| actually run it.
I'm afraid I feel like I'm missing something here. I do not understand
how "dueling screensavers" would occur -- is this if both
the sipb xscreensaver and the release's jwz xscreensaver are
configured to autolock the screen after some time interval? I wasn't
aware sipb xscreensaver had such a feature or that it was widely used.
If it's not that, then how is this problem specific to xscreensaver?
It seems like you'd encounter the same problem with xlockmore (in outland),
for instance.
--jhawk
