Public bug reported:
Doing an "apt-cache search libsdl" shows these packages:
libsdl1.2debian
libsdl1.2debian-all
libsdl1.2debian-alsa
libsdl1.2debian-esd
libsdl1.2debian-oss
libsdl1.2debian-arts
libsdl1.2debian-nas
...all of which are the same library, providing the same API to
applications, except each is built with different audio backends (ALSA,
Esound, /dev/dsp, etc).
We've spent a lot of time in the last few versions of SDL cleaning it up
so that it can use these various backends without explicitly linking to
them. The latest SDL release, 1.2.12, can be built as a binary that
supplies any GNU/Linux audio or video target without explicitly linking
to anything by glibc.
Things like xlib, alsalib, etc, will be dlopen()'d at runtime, and if
they aren't available, SDL will try other avenues until it finds the
optimal available path.
The end result is that you no longer need a separate SDL package for
each target, as one build will fit all scenarios, and SDL will also be
more robust against uncommon scenarios, like a user attempting to run
software on the framebuffer device when there's no X server. This also
allows SDL to gracefully handle things that may not be available at the
moment on a given system, and it also allows a more flexible library
without having ever-increasing complexity in the package system (for
example, 1.2.12 added PulseAudio support, but it wouldn't necessarily
need yet-another libsdl1.2 package).
SDL builds like this by default in 1.2.12, if you build it with gcc 4.x,
and the configure script sees the dev packages for various backend
targets (so it will compile against, say, the alsalib headers, but it
won't link against the alsalib libraries until it tries to dlopen() them
at runtime, doing the right thing if they aren't found then).
Is it possible to get these all merged into one, unified package that is
built with all the audio/video backends?
Thanks,
--ryan.
** Affects: libsdl1.2 (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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libsdl-1.2 package has unnecessary variants
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128447
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