since I have to maintain a SDL 1.2 for some years anyway, I thought maybe there were other people interested in sharing the work load.
There’s quite a number of patches flying around already, and all the major distros still have SDL 1.2 packages. And each of those distros has a slightly different set of bug fixes.
This would be an unofficial fork, and will live on our github organisation (https://github.com/pygame/) (rather than inside our github repo as it is now). Part of the work will be putting together release tar balls, and doing QA (which we do already), but also trying to submit patches to distros that are missing various patches. For example, Arch linux has some patches that homebrew doesn’t, and Debian has other patches. Then there are patches in the bug tracker that were given to SDL 1.2, but never made it into a 1.2 series release.
It will be limited to bug fixes rather than new features. And mostly about gathering the existing patches and bug fixes, and trying to get them into different distros.
Anyone interested in helping out, or in using this?
Oh right, I didn’t see there are commits in the 1.2 branch. Maybe there is already a 1.2 release planned after all?
I submitted a couple of patches to homebrew sdl, sdl_image already. For now I’ll just pull in a bunch of bug fixes from various distros into my own sdl 1.2 builds.
Well. homebrew just rejected a patch because “they don’t want to maintain” it. I get their point that they don’t want to maintain things themselves (even with other people doing the work with patches it seems). However, for users of all the SDL1 software out there, it’s a pretty dire situation.
So, I’d still like to do a SDL1.2 bugfix release. And am making a list of patches for such a release. As I mentioned, I already compile and QA SDL1 releases on quite a few platforms.
At least you should get your patches into the SDL-1.2 hg branch.
(And I guess a release would make sense with all the changes that have been done; but maybe try to get a fix for the Win10 relative mouse issue in first? Or is that already resolved?)
There’s a workaround in SDL2 (which I implemented), but not SDL1.2 (because I don’t care about it enough to debug the issue there as well).
I’m not 100% sure that bug still exists in Win10 (haven’t checked in a while), but I am 100% sure that it was not fixed with the big update “1803” in April - at least not for the way SDL2 uses SetCursorPos().
Ah ok, thanks! I’ll add it to my list for testing.
My current plan is to gather the patches list, and then make sure they are available in a nice form on the sdl bug tracker. Then my own SDL1 builds pull these patches from the SDL bugzilla, and I can more easily ask people to do some manual QA on different systems. Then I’ll make the patch list available on a wiki page somewhere. After that, we’ll see if the changes get merged in (if they haven’t already been), and I’ll have a clearer idea of where things are.
I think the biggest unsolved problem I know about on linux machines is the sdl_mixer with fluidsynth using up lots of CPU even when sdl_mixer isn’t being used.
The biggest Mac issue I know of is that it is really slow in windowed mode… for some people.
Oh right, I didn’t see there are commits in the 1.2 branch. Maybe there is already a 1.2 release planned after all?
Our policy has been that 1.2 fixes can go in revision control, so they aren’t lost to time, but we don’t have any plans to do a formal 1.2.16 release. I wouldn’t be against doing one more release from that branch as 1.2.16, but we sincerely don’t want to look at 1.2 more than we have to. It’s been a branch kept on life support in revision control for a long time now.
I’m finding it quite slow going. (These are not a complaints, just explaining how things are to my understanding, and perhaps someone can help me). There’s no linkage between most patches and issues viewable with the commit history, and no automatic linking in the issue tracker(as in github/bitbucket/gitlab/etc). Also the distro patches do not always link to an SDL bug, but to a forum post, or some other bug tracker. There’s also not always a link to any bugtracker on some of the patches. Additionally, search engines have been told they can’t index the sdl bug tracker, so it’s not searchable with better search tools(like google as one example). I can’t add keywords to the SDL bug tracker, so I’m not sure how helpful my notes are going to be. I’m not sure how to see on the sdl bug tracker if any particular patch has had QA work done on it, so I will probably assume unless it’s in a distro probably none other than the patch author.
You can probably see that there’s at least two fairly important fixes not in the SDL 1.2 branch. And that’s just from the SDL1.2 package, in one distro. There are also a number of patches in the 1.2 branch that haven’t made it into some distros. I don’t have a clear idea of the amount of testing the branch fixes have had, but I assume the distro patches have had quite a lot of QA (especially if they are also in the 1.2 branch).
I’m still not entirely sure how best to organize this work. I can start some bugs reports in the sdl tracker for things not included in the 1.2 branch. But what to mark them with? It would be handy if there was a keyword or something in the sdl bug tracker for this.