[Pkg-nx-group] New situation with NX 3.0 and debian

[Leopold Palomo-Avellaneda]

A Dijous 05 Juliol 2007 18:06, Stefan Lippers-Hollmann va escriure:
> Hi
>
> On Donnerstag, 5. Juli 2007, Leopold Palomo-Avellaneda wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm new in the list and I would like to help in the packaging of freeNX.
> > Yesterday I met to Fabian Franz (FreeNX author) and we have been talking
> > about FreeNX.
> >
> > He is preparing a new structure for the code and I asked him about the
> > problems of having freeNX in a debian box. It's strange but there are
> > random people trying to make packages of freeNX and this group, but
> > nothing more or less stable.
>
> FreeNX is the least of the problems, although it begs to question if it is
> consistently maintained (it certainly wasn't in 2006).

Well, Fabian is working on it. He is preparing a new version based on NX 3.0, 
so I think that yes. Think, he told me that one of the problems is a bad 
package of the project, making the same problems repeatedly.

> > FreeNX it's only some scripts that use the nx-core from Nomachine. This
> > core is gpl and freeNx too, so by now there's no problem about licenses.
>
> What is seriously required here is upstream work, to get rid of private
> source copies/ forks, which first means distinguishing changes from
> upstream, trying to merge differences at their respective upstreams (no
> chance for the X related parts, as those are distributed under the
> GPL2-only, the same goes for nxssh versus OpenSSH - although this fork can
> probably be reverted) - unfortunately NoMachine hasn't been very receptive
> to patches in the past.

Your are talking of NX, no?

> > The source code of nx-core, I have to addmitt that I have found it like a
> > mesh. There's a lot of packages and the main package nx-x11 it's a part
> > of the xfree/xorg. Fabian told me that nx-core 2.x is based on "some"
> > version of xfree, but the new one nx-core 3.0 is based on "some" version
> > xorg.
>
> The real serious issue are the NX libraries, which (still with NX 3.0)
> duplicate a lot of code from other upstream projects: - the whole X source
> tree (X.org 6.6 this time, instead of a radom XFree86 4.3 development
> snapshot in the past) - esound 0.2.36, in comparison to an ancient pre-
> woody version until now - samba 3.0
> - GKrellM 2.2.10
> - OpenSSH 4.4p1
> TightVNC and rdesktop forks have fortunately been dropped with NX 3.0.

Ok, ufff ......

> > I don't understand the svn of pkg-nx group. I see that is only the debian
> > part, but in the freeNX I think that it's the source code of the project.
> > So, please, could someone explain me the structure and the main idea?
> > Because in this repository is where the source of nx have to go or only
> > the debian files?
>
> Getting the sources to build and "run" isn't easy, but can be made possible
> in reasonable time, getting it into a state for debian archive inclusion is
> next to impossible without *serious* changes. That's probably the reason
> for most stalled attempts at packaging NX.

ok, could you tell how? I'm not really be able to compile the nx-x11 package. 
I have to addmitt that I don't use Imakefiles and I don't know how it works.

> > Also, there's a project of a free client
> > http://code.2x.com/linuxterminalserver/downloads
> > with a GPL licences that it will be interesting to add to the project.
>
> In that public svn is not only the client and library parts, but also the
> perl based and mature nxnode/ nxserver 1.5 source under the GPL2, 2X
> Software Ltd. is also very receptive to patches (including svn write
> access) and easily reachable.
>
> My personal plan was to get 2X NX 1.5/ 1.6 to build following FHS path
> names last year (very, very initial hacking here:
> http://sidux.com/files/wip/), with the prospect of slowly merging in
> changes from more current updates of NoMachine's GPLed sources and trying
> to trim down private copies of forks from other projects - until I hit the
> limits of my barely existing perl knowledge (nxnode/ nxserver's build
> system has a lot of non-FHS compliant hard coded paths and other issues)
> and serious time constraints.

well, talking with Fabian he told that he doesn't want to follow the 2x branch 
because it's _only_ with NX 2.x version. He prefer to go to NX 3.x branch 
from nochine that is gpl and not the 2x branch. 

The important think, and I realise about it's to have a client, a gpl client.

Regards,

Leo