#788176 diodon: possible not to depend on zeitgeist?

Package:
diodon
Source:
diodon
Description:
GTK+ Clipboard manager
Submitter:
Christoph Anton Mitterer
Date:
2021-03-26 19:24:02 UTC
Severity:
wishlist
Tags:
#788176#5
Date:
2015-06-09 01:40:17 UTC
From:
To:
Hey.

Since 1.3 the package depends on zeitgeist-core...
Is this really necessary?

It seem a bit like software bloat if I need a all-the-time
running daemon with extensive logging stuff... also it's a GNOME3
project which many people from other DEs may not want to run/install.


Cheers,
Chris.

#788176#10
Date:
2015-06-09 01:46:26 UTC
From:
To:
It should perhaps further be noted that zeitgeist seems no longer be
developer or maybe even dead upstream,... the last entries on their
mailing lists are from 2013, and upstream states in several locations
that there's "no further active development".


Cheers,
Chris.

#788176#15
Date:
2015-06-09 17:25:47 UTC
From:
To:
I can understand your concerns, let me outline a couple of things here
though:

1. Diodon does work on other DEs but is mainly targeted to integrate
well into GNOME and Unity [0]

2. It is true (unfortunately) that Zeitgeist is not actively developed
anymore but it is still maintained [1] and you can find commits for bug
fixes from this year in the git history [2]

3. In my knowledge there is no other library available with a similar
feature set as Zeitgeist. Also Zeitgeist gives us the ability to
separate the clipboard history from the Diodon process so any
application can access the history independently.
There are other important features gained by integrating Zeitgeist which
you can read more at [3] and [4].

All in all replacing Zeitgeist would mean to rewrite most of Diodon and
hence not really feasible.

Therefore marking this bug as wontfix but certainly open for suggestions
if there is a similar library out there which could be a potential
replacement for Zeitgeist.

Cheers,
Oliver

[0] https://launchpad.net/diodon
[1] http://geekyogre.com/moving-on/
[2] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/zeitgeist/zeitgeist/
[3]
https://esite.ch/2013/12/storing-clipboard-items-infinitely-test-version/
[4] https://esite.ch/2014/03/clipboard-unity-scope-with-its-full-potential/

#788176#24
Date:
2015-06-19 17:01:48 UTC
From:
To:
Hey Oliver.

AFAICS you're also upstream, right?


1) Well as you say, it works quite nicely with other DEs, at least
those close to GNOME (like Cinnamon).
Depending on Zeitgeist more or less excludes these users - maybe not
from a technical PoV, but rather because such people typically don't
use GNOME for things just like Zeitgeist.

IMHO, it's a bit sad to focus such a nice tool only on a few desktop
system...


2) ...and especially when zeitgeist is only in limited-maintenance
mode, other DEs are probably not likely to build on it.


3) Well I have nothing against using Zeitgeist, but things have worked
so fare quite nicely without it, so can't you just make it one optional
backend, keeping the previous one as an alternative?

Not requiring Zeitgeist has worked before, so why shouldn't it now?

As for the features:
I'm not sure whether e.g. "storing clipboard items infinitely" is a
good idea in all cases, over time this could be quite some privacy
issue. (Yes I've seen that you have history clearing).
I personally wouldn't need to have anything stored permanently at
all,... so maybe as solution could be to store things just in memory,
thereby not requiring any storage backend at all?


Best wishes,
Chris.

#788176#29
Date:
2015-06-25 12:11:01 UTC
From:
To:
yes
I guess as a software project you have to make a decision what the goal
is within the limited time and resources available. Do you want to
integrate really well with full potential into a subset of DEs or do you
want to run with a very small footprint on as many DEs as possible? To
do both is as of limited resources not really feasible therefore for
Diodon we chose the former.
The previous backend doesn't work anymore as with Zeitgeist a feature
has been added that the clipboard history can be accessed by external
services and then a uri opened to paste the content. This is possible as
Zeitgeist can be accessed through a DBus service.
This feature is already used by services like the Unity Scope but to
expanded to more services. Adding another backend would make this
integration inconsistent and is therefore not desirable.
If privacy is your concern it is actually possible to run Zeitgeist in
memory only so each time you login your clipboard history is clean.

You can do this by setting following env var (e.g. adding it to
~/.pam_environment):
ZEITGEIST_DATABASE_PATH=:memory:

To summarize: it seems what you are looking for is a clipboard manager
with a small footprint with basics function but runs well on all DEs. I
think if you want to use Diodon for such a use case an option would be
if a maintainer could be found who continues to maintain Diodon version
1.0.3. I am happy to support something like this but do not have the
time to maintain it myself.

Cheers,
Oliver

#788176#36
Date:
2021-03-26 13:39:48 UTC
From:
To:
Chrome and bash do not appear to be doing this. After investigating a little more, it appears that Clipit aka Diodon saves everything I copy-paste to Zeitgeist, and it is not cleared from the "text" table when I press clear in the applet. I don't know if this is intentional or a bug, but it is user-hostile, and I feel that it is a major privacy and security concern.

I used commands like the following to check what has been logged.

#788176#41
Date:
2021-03-26 19:15:20 UTC
From:
To:
Thanks Sam for reporting this.

This is actually not fully related to the original report of this issue
as it is a bug that `Clear` method does not completely remove clipboard
content from the Zeitgeist database as I agree it really should.

As discussed on the upstream issue [0] I will look into this and will
track the progress there.

[0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/diodon/+bug/1921507