version incompatibilities

Bug #1589336 reported by Rolf Leggewie
14
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
xpra (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

some versions of xpra cannot talk to each other. Apparently, compatibility was broken somewhere between trusty and xenial without documenting it. This was reported in bug 1545296 and I was able to verify that trusty cannot talk to jessie-backports while trusty to jessie itself works (somewhat).

Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Changed in xpra (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Rolf Leggewie (r0lf) wrote :

Further research verifies this. As discussed in https://bugs.debian.org/805751 in combination with the changelog, it would appear that any version 0.15.0 and later cannot talk to one that is prior. The Debian maintainer failed to document this properly, even if he eventually added python-rencode to Depends. But that is only one side of the equation.

Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)
summary: - version incompatabilities
+ version incompatibilities
Revision history for this message
Antoine Martin (antoine-nagafix) wrote :

That's absolute nonsense, this bug was fixed AGES ago and IIRC it only affected installations without rencode.

Had Ubuntu or Debian applied the dozens of fixes to the branch they split from, we wouldn't be having this ticket, and we would have saved dozens of hours of support work at our end - not to mention the damage done to the image for the project.

Revision history for this message
Rolf Leggewie (r0lf) wrote :

The only nonsense is your comment.

Even if this was fixed ages ago (did you care to look at how long ago this report was made?) then if there are incompatibilities between the binary versions of supported Ubuntu releases then it is still a bug in Ubuntu. What you suggest should have happened (to backport patches) is generally a good approach in case that is feasible at all (and I have my doubts on this being an option).

I cannot verify these incompatibilities (or others) still exist in later releases but given upstream's nonchalance attitude to breaking API between their different versions, I wouldn't be surprised if there still are some.

Revision history for this message
Rolf Leggewie (r0lf) wrote :

I would like to thank you for your work upstream, especially since my last comment was unnecessarily harsh. I believe you and I understand the dilemma between a stable distribution and out of date code. Many attempts have been made to address this, including rolling releases, SRU policies, flatpak, appimage, snap etc. The problem remains.

I understand your frustration when users complain that something is not working. I remember discussing the problem in IRC with the xpra community. I don't remember the details but I walked away with the strong feeling that they had no clue whatsoever about distros and packaging yet where attempting to package for hundreds of platforms, something that simply cannot be done correctly.

I hope the relation between Debian/Ubuntu on one hand and xpra can become more productive. If your idea of that is to backport large swathes of code or even "worse" to push back entire upstream releases to a stable Ubuntu release, I am sure you will be disappointed. Once a release is finalized only targeted bugfixes can be applied (-> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates)

I am a packager and I'm willing to do my part make Ubuntu packages in LTS releases better. Let's work together.

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