Re: [Qemu-devel] [QUESTION] SDL 1.2 support

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 01:17:01PM +0200, Aleksandar Markovic wrote:
> Hello, Gerd, Daniel, and others involved.
> 
> I have multiple reports from end users that say that transition from
> SDL 1.2 to SDL 2.0 was difficult, or even impossible for their hosts.
> In that light, they don't appreciate removing SDL 1.2 support from
> QEMU. The most notable example is Ubutnu 16.04, where it looks there
> is no way of installing SDL 2.0 that does not involve complete OS
> upgrade, which, for various reasons, many are not willing to do.

Ubuntu has shipped SDL 2 for a long time now, for 16.04 and before.

> It looks to me that depreciation of SDL 1.2 was a little premature. My
> humble opinion is that we should not look at release dates of
> libraries when we deprecate them, but release dates and end-of-support
> dates of major Linux distribution that include them.

We do indeed based deprecations off our suppported build platform
targets as defined here:

  https://qemu.weilnetz.de/doc/qemu-doc.html#Supported-build-platforms

As above, Ubuntu has shipped SDL2 for a long time already, so removing
SDL 1.2 was considered to not be a problem.

> My question for you is: How difficult would be to reactivate SDL 1.2
> support in QEMU, and postpone its depreciation for a couple of years?

In the absence of more info, I'm not seeing a compelling reason to
undelete SDL 1.2, given all our supported build platforms ship SDL 2

Regards,
Daniel
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