[CentOS] XScreenSaver

[Jonathan Billings]

On Apr 8, 2018, at 07:54, Nicolas Kovacs <info at microlinux.fr> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm currently moving all our local school's desktop clients from
> Slackware 14.1 to CentOS 7 + Xfce. Right now I'm fine-tuning the default
> user profile.
> 
> I have a problem with XScreenSaver. The application per se works very
> well. Only there's a hard-coded pop-up window that reminds the user that
> he's not running the latest version. So, if I'm running version 5.36 as
> provided by the EPEL repo and not the latest and greatest 5.38 as
> provided upstream, I get a pestering pop-up window informing me that
> YOUR VERSION OF XSCREENSAVER IS VERY OLD. This functionality is
> apparently hard-coded, since there's no way to deactivating it.
> 
> The Slackware distribution seems to have solved the problem by promising
> upstream to keep things up-to-date.
> 
> For the moment I simply work without it, because I'm annoyed by my users
> phoning me and asking me what's this thing with their screensaver being
> too old.
> 
> As far as I can tell, there would be several solutions to this problem.
> 
> 1. Ask the EPEL maintainers to keep the application up-to-date.
> 
> 2. Patch the darn thing so I don't get the annoying popup.
> 
> 3. Maintain my own up-to-date version of XScreenSaver in my private repo.
> 
> Any thoughts about this?

It appears that the spec file actually patches xscreensaver to change the time bomb date to be the build time, so you’d only need to rebuild it to make it stop. (The EPEL maintainer could too)

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/xscreensaver/blob/epel7/f/xscreensaver.spec#_440

JWZ would prefer people not patch out the time bomb (and stop calling the time bomb a time bomb, too bad). He’d rather people not use xscreensaver at all. He probably is annoyed about getting bug reports from users of distros that have an out of date version, but I have to say his solution is pretty caustic. 

--
Jonathan Billings