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It's surprising that upstream was involved in this. Around 5 years ago, I came to the (sad) conclusion that GNU screen development had completely halted. Is tha
by mmsc 1y ago
It's surprising that upstream was involved in this. Around 5 years ago, I came to the (sad) conclusion that GNU screen development had completely halted. Is that still not the case?
Does screen have the functionality to add a new window to an existing screen without attaching to the screen yet?
- Trasmatta 1y ago> Due to difficulties in the communication with upstream we do not currently have detailed information about bugfixes and releases published on their end. It sounds like they requested the security review, but have been difficult to keep in touch with? I'm not sure what the whole story is there.
- tecleandor 1y agoYep, from the timeline it looks like lack of communication (and maybe also capabilities/resources/time/will, not sure) [0] 0: https://security.opensuse.org/2025/05/12/screen-security-issues.html#8-timeline
- mmsc 1y agoSeems like a prime target for Jia Tan.
- croemer 1y agoInvolved only insofar as shipping it as setuid-root counts. Distros that configure it like this are vulnerable, others aren't. Very thin involvement I'd say. Distros patch if upstream is too slow.
- jzb 1y agoUpstream requested that the SUSE team take a look at it. It seems that development is understaffed and the upstream may not have the expertise to maintain it properly. Which, if true, is sad -- I know that tmux and others exist, but a lot of people have used Screen for many many years. It sucks when a tool bitrots.
- marcosdumay 1y agoLooks like a tech-debt ridden large piece of software that new developers just can't understand. If that's the case, it's not really about it being "understaffed". Instead, it's doomed to rot until it's replaced of rewritten. There's no scenario where more maintainers will help, except for marginally delaying it. The good news is that there are almost perfect replacements out there, and most of them are leaner.
- megous 1y agoIt's not large: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/screen.git/tree/src https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/screen.git/tree/src A few 2kLOC files and the rest is rather small.
- doctoboggan 1y agoWhat are the replacement tools I should be looking at as a casual user of screen?
- immibis 1y agoOpen source does have a problem with inertia whenever one piece of software ends and another piece is created to replace it, but there's no immediate incentive to switch, because it is a switch, not an update. Though conversely, when someone buys the trademark for an existing piece of software, and replaces it with something entirely different, like what happened with Audacity, that's also bad. So there's no good solution.
- Wowfunhappy 1y agoIsn't this what distros are for? So e.g. Debian could decide to replace screen with tmux, possibly with some sort of compatibility package that takes all the same command line arguments as screen but uses tmux under the hood. (I've used screen very little and have never used tmux so I'm not sure if that would make sense in this context).
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoTmux doesn't support serial ports.
- PhilipRoman 1y agoI'm not sure what made "screen" integrate the two separate pieces of functionality - you can use something minimal like "tio" for serial port access and it's much more elegant.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoIt isn't separate functionality. Terminals connected via serial port is a valid use case for a terminal multiplexor.
- PhilipRoman 1y agoIn theory you're correct, but by that logic you'd also have to add ssh (probably by far the most common way of connecting to a remote terminal today). I guess you'd end up with something like mobaXTerm which is a valid approach for sure, but doesn't compose as well. Personally I live by the maxim "if it can be separated without significant drawbacks, then it should be separate" but GNU tends to see it differently.
- criddell 1y agoIt’s not necessarily sad for GNU tool development to stop (other than bug fixes, of course). I would take that as a sign that they are basically complete.
- lxgr 1y agoWhether constant development is necessary or not largely depends on the surface area of your tool, both in terms of formal APIs it uses and external data formats and services.
- kstrauser 1y agoNot quite in this case. Tmux was started by someone who wanted to update screen with new features but wasn’t able to bend the code that far. I say this not out of spite or meanness, as I used screen for many happy years, but I’d say it’s less complete and more abandoned. It still has maintainers but it seems to me that they’re more “keep the lights on” than actively developing it.
- dundarious 1y agoscreen didn't even have vertical splits until maybe 5 or 10 years ago. After tmux was already a solidly reliable replacement with vertical splits for years.
- wkat4242 1y agoTrue, this is why I switched to tmux.
- Kwpolska 1y agoIt's not sad if a good Stallman-free alternative exists. Like tmux.