[winswitch] The last usable version of xpra is 0.7.30

[Martin Ebourne]

I am in the slightly unusual position where my day job requires me to
run everything in New York while I live in Australia. That is everything
I use (xterm, emacs, firefox, evolution, rdesktop, and more) runs on a
host in NY and I work from home permanently over ADSL in Australia over
ssh with X forwarding.

The minimum round trip (ping) time is 300ms, and since everything I do
has to go via this it probably makes me more latency sensitive than
most. Fortunately xpra (at least the older versions) is awesome at
removing the round trips so I only pay the latency cost once and making
this arrangement entirely usable.

Recently I decided to try the latest versions of xpra to get some of the
new benefits (for the last couple of years I've been using a pre-fork
checkout from hg) but unfortunately I found the experience to be quite
unusable.

I first tried xpra 3.2 but the latency was terrible, multi-second waits
were absolutely commonplace. I tried successively older versions until I
found the last usable version of xpra which was 0.7.30.

Wanting to narrow this down some more I built some versions from svn and
found that r283 was the last usable revision in terms of responsiveness
(though it had some redraw issues I never had on the pre-fork version).
Looking at r284 I found it implemented a new feature "damage_sequence"
which was enabled in the client. By making a one line change to the
client to disable this feature r284 itself became quite usable too. I am
now using r513 with damage_sequence disabled, and it is still usable
(possibly a little slower than r283 but I'm not sure as network leg
varies). r513 hasn't had any redraw problems so far.

In r514 the damage_sequence option is removed in the server and versions
post that are again unusable due to high latency for me. I've tried up
to r920 with the same results. Trying the various different options for
encoding etc did not help. The latest HEAD fails with some opengl errors
for me.

I'd like to be able to upgrade to the latest versions. Have you any idea
what the problem is and if there is a way to fix it?

Cheers,
Martin