Bug 2119807

Hi Pierre, thanks for filing the BZ. I made an internal ticket to add it back to the CRB repository, which then should take care of having it in for the rest of the RHEL 9 lifecycle.

Just as a side note: the Xorg server is deprecated in RHEL 9, so its packages might be completely removed in a future version of RHEL (i.e. 10 or later)

(In reply to Niels De Graef from comment #2)
> Hi Pierre, thanks for filing the BZ. I made an internal ticket to add it
> back to the CRB repository, which then should take care of having it in for
> the rest of the RHEL 9 lifecycle.
> 

Thanks! What's the timeframe for it hitting CentOS repos? So I can start enabling RHEL 9 builds in our CI.

> Just as a side note: the Xorg server is deprecated in RHEL 9, so its
> packages might be completely removed in a future version of RHEL (i.e. 10 or
> later)

That's concerning. Does that mean that TigerVNC won't be included in RHEL 10? Or at least not the server?

And I guess RHEL 10 will no longer support installing alternative desktop environments (e.g. from EPEL), such as MATE or Xfce?

And will you also remove X11 support from e.g. GTK? So that even if X.org or TigerVNC are installed manually, applications will still not work there?

(In reply to Pierre Ossman from comment #5)
> (In reply to Niels De Graef from comment #2)
> > Hi Pierre, thanks for filing the BZ. I made an internal ticket to add it
> > back to the CRB repository, which then should take care of having it in for
> > the rest of the RHEL 9 lifecycle.
> > 
> 
> Thanks! What's the timeframe for it hitting CentOS repos? So I can start
> enabling RHEL 9 builds in our CI.

Should be this week or the next I reckon. 

> > Just as a side note: the Xorg server is deprecated in RHEL 9, so its
> > packages might be completely removed in a future version of RHEL (i.e. 10 or
> > later)
> 
> That's concerning. Does that mean that TigerVNC won't be included in RHEL
> 10? Or at least not the server?

Anything that depends on Xorg (*not* X11) should probably try to make it an optional dependency, or remove the dependency altogether. For TigerVNC, that will probably mean it should support Wayland (see also https://github.com/TigerVNC/tigervnc/issues/158) by porting to the RemoteDesktop portal (https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/#gdbus-org.freedesktop.portal.RemoteDesktop). Note that those portals are agnostic of X11 or Wayland, so DE's supporting them will allow you to use TigerVNC for both.

If you or other TigerVNC developers need some help on where to start, feel free to send me an email :-) I can connect you to the relevant people who can help you out

> And I guess RHEL 10 will no longer support installing alternative desktop
> environments (e.g. from EPEL), such as MATE or Xfce?

It depends: if those DEs do not have a direct dependency on Xorg (but they do on X11 for example), then it should still be possible to install. One can run a full DE within Xwayland if you want.

> And will you also remove X11 support from e.g. GTK? So that even if X.org or
> TigerVNC are installed manually, applications will still not work there?

No, we're deprecating Xorg (the X11 server), not X11 itself. That will probably linger on for quite a while as there are still legacy clients which might never be ported. They run through Xwayland (which as an aside, is also an X11 server).

(In reply to Niels De Graef from comment #7)
> (In reply to Pierre Ossman from comment #5)
> > 
> > That's concerning. Does that mean that TigerVNC won't be included in RHEL
> > 10? Or at least not the server?
> 
> Anything that depends on Xorg (*not* X11) should probably try to make it an
> optional dependency, or remove the dependency altogether. For TigerVNC, that
> will probably mean it should support Wayland (see also
> https://github.com/TigerVNC/tigervnc/issues/158) by porting to the
> RemoteDesktop portal
> (https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/#gdbus-org.freedesktop.portal.
> RemoteDesktop). Note that those portals are agnostic of X11 or Wayland, so
> DE's supporting them will allow you to use TigerVNC for both.
> 

That sounds like controlling your existing, local session (i.e. x0vncserver). I'm primarily worried about creating new, fully remote sessions (i.e. Xvnc).

> If you or other TigerVNC developers need some help on where to start, feel
> free to send me an email :-) I can connect you to the relevant people who
> can help you out

Please point them our way. :)

Right now, we don't really know where to start as we've only seen work on accessing a local session, not how fully remote Wayland sessions should be created. An architectural overview of how that is supposed to work would be very helpful.

> 
> > And I guess RHEL 10 will no longer support installing alternative desktop
> > environments (e.g. from EPEL), such as MATE or Xfce?
> 
> It depends: if those DEs do not have a direct dependency on Xorg (but they
> do on X11 for example), then it should still be possible to install. One can
> run a full DE within Xwayland if you want.
> 

Interesting. This is getting off-topic, but do you have a quick reference on how that should be set up? I assume just putting stuff in /usr/share/xsessions isn't enough?

> > And will you also remove X11 support from e.g. GTK? So that even if X.org or
> > TigerVNC are installed manually, applications will still not work there?
> 
> No, we're deprecating Xorg (the X11 server), not X11 itself. That will
> probably linger on for quite a while as there are still legacy clients which
> might never be ported. They run through Xwayland (which as an aside, is also
> an X11 server).

Just to clarify, my concern is with modern toolkits with mature Wayland support (like GTK), not the legacy stuff. If Red Hat are leaning too hard in to Wayland, then my concern is that someone thinks that X11 support in GTK is just useless fluff and drops it. And in the process hobbling a manually installed TigerVNC Xvnc.

(and thank you for elaborating, even if this is a bit off-topic)

I'm afraid I'm still not seeing any package in either the package browser or in the repos. Any update?

I can see it here http://mirror.stream.centos.org/9-stream/CRB/x86_64/os/Packages/xorg-x11-server-source-1.20.11-11.el9.noarch.rpm, do you have CRB repo enabled?

Thanks! No, I did not have that enabled. I noticed that PowerTools were gone from CentOS 9, but I could not find anything equivalent. CRB seems to be a bit underdocumented. E.g. it's not mentioned here:

https://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories

I also couldn't find it here, so I figured it simply hadn't rolled out yet:

https://access.redhat.com/downloads/content/package-browser

But evidently it is still out there. :)

Thanks again!

Unfortunately, another required package is also missing; xorg-x11-font-utils. Oddly enough, I can find a build entry¹ for it, but it's not found in any repo.

Should I open a new bugzilla entry, or can that be handled here?

¹ https://kojihub.stream.centos.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=13289

xorg-x11-font-utils was split up into several subpackages (see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/XorgUtilityDeaggregation), of which some are not part of the repos. So it kind of depends on what specific package you need from those

Oh. I see. Oddly enough, it still seems to work in Fedora, as both their TigerVNC and Xorg builds still depend on it:

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/tigervnc/blob/rawhide/f/tigervnc.spec
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/xorg-x11-server/blob/rawhide/f/xorg-x11-server.spec

And I can still install it, with the expected contents, on Fedora 35.

So, was this specific package perhaps not changed, despite that plan? Or is RHEL doing things differently from Fedora?

Also note that dnf is unable to find the relevant file in some other package:

> $ sudo dnf install  /usr/share/aclocal/fontutil.m4
> Updating Subscription Management repositories.
> Last metadata expiration check: 1:32:38 ago on Fri 14 Oct 2022 09:20:59 AM CEST.
> No match for argument: /usr/share/aclocal/fontutil.m4
> Error: Unable to find a match: /usr/share/aclocal/fontutil.m4

This is with CRB enabled.

Most probably libXfont2-devel is what you need and I believe it is in CRB.

Afraid not. It doesn't include any m4 macros. And it doesn't pull in anything indirectly:

> $ grep -R XORG_FONT_MACROS_VERSION /usr/share/aclocal*
> $ 

:/

I also can't install xorg-x11-server-source on a real RHEL 9. Was it just added to CentOS? CRB is enabled on this system.

Since the problem described in this bug report should be
resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a
resolution of ERRATA.

For information on the advisory (Moderate: xorg-x11-server security and bug fix update), and where to find the updated
files, follow the link below.

If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report.

https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2022:8221

The Xorg source package is now available from the codeready builder repo. Thanks!

The font-utils package is still missing though, so it's still not possible to build Xvnc. I've filed bug 2142931 as a request to fix that.