New extra packages and yum repository

[Mike A. Harris]

On Wed, 15 Oct 2003, Chris Ricker wrote:

>> I'd like to see the RSS-GLX included in redhat, or at least one of the
>> fedora servers.. I have seen rss-gls packages by at least one other
>> person, and by Ximian too...
>> 
>> > - rss-glx-0.7.6-1 (screen savers, need new ImageMagick packages from
>> 
>> If we're going to ship screen savers, we may as well ship good ones...
>
>As a counter-argument, though, there are enough problems with the GL-based
>xscreensaver savers crashing X servers already, without adding more eye
>candy into the mix which'll do the same (and if you look in bugzilla, you'll 
>find there are already bug reports in there from RSS crashing X servers)

I'm a bit mixed feeling about this.  On one side, I'm kindof a 
bit curious as to wether the rss screensavers are 100% copyright 
clean, and comments on their website or in the source before 
triggered my legal warning alarm, although I have no idea what it 
was now as that was a year or more ago.

Adding them would likely in some cases result in new 
crashes/hangs being found, so that's bad in one sense, but in 
another sense, it would make bugs more apparent, and those savers 
are more intensive than other GL screensavers we ship so it would 
be good test coverage IMHO.

It's on my "things to investigate for future" list, in particular 
legal issues are #1.  If I can be satisfied that no legal issues 
exist though, and bounce it off our legal dept, and experiment 
with the savers for a while, I can probably be convinced to make 
a case for us to included them at some point.


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat