Menu ▾ ▴

#979 crossfire-client: Depends on SDL 1.2 and is unmaintained

2.x
open
nobody
None
Other (Please Specify in Description)
5
2025-08-20
2025-08-20
Rick Tanner
No

Source URL: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1038178

Source: crossfire-client
Tags: trixie sid
User: pkg-sdl-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org
Usertags: libsdl1.2

This package has a Depends or Build-Depends on SDL version 1.2, which is unmaintained upstream.

If possible, please port this package to SDL 2 and close this bug. There is a migration guide at https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL2/MigrationGuide, and examples of successful ports from SDL 1.2 to SDL 2 can be found in the commit history of packages like darkplaces and ioquake3.

If it is not possible to port to SDL 2, please test the package with libsdl1.2-compat-shim (preferably version 1.2.64 or later), and leave this bug open to track the package as still using SDL 1.2 APIs.

libsdl1.2-compat-shim is a compatibility layer that provides the SDL 1.2 API/ABI by using SDL 2: it has already replaced the "classic" SDL 1.2 library in some other distributions like Fedora and Arch, and my intention is to do the same in Debian during the trixie release cycle.

It is not necessary to change dependencies from libsdl1.2debian to libsdl1.2-compat-shim, or from libsdl1.2-dev to libsdl1.2-compat-dev. My intention is to make a future version of sdl12-compat take over the old package names, to minimize the changes that are required in dependent packages.

The interesting scenarios to test with libsdl1.2-compat-shim are:

  1. Install libsdl1.2-compat-shim and run the program in an X11 environment, such as "GNOME on Xorg" or XFCE. ($XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/wayland-* should not exist)
  2. Install libsdl1.2-compat-shim and run the program in a Wayland environment such as GNOME's default mode, using Xwayland. ($XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/wayland-* should exist)
  3. Install libsdl1.2-compat-shim and run the program in a Wayland environment, but this time with environment variable SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland so that it uses the native Wayland interface (this is not currently the default for SDL 2).
  4. Install libsdl1.2-compat-dev and recompile the package.

Note that using libsdl1.2-compat and LD_LIBRARY_PATH is not sufficient if the package contains programs that are setgid games. See https://github.com/libsdl-org/sdl12-compat/blob/main/HOW_TO_TEST_GAMES.md for more information.

If any of those fail, please report it as a bug in the libsdl1.2-compat-shim or libsdl1.2-compat-dev package as appropriate, with "affects" pointing to the program that is affected.

Discussion

  • Kevin Zheng

    Kevin Zheng - 2025-08-20

    We updated to SDL2 in bae2a4a7ba2ad5454920ad6f7153a0b8063cc24c which shipped in 1.75.3. What version is currently in Debian?

     

Log in to post a comment.