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  • Bug#1083037: RM: directfb -- RoQA; RC-buggy, unmaintained

    From Simon McVittie@21:1/5 to Niels Thykier on Fri Jan 3 17:30:02 2025
    XPost: linux.debian.ports.arm, linux.debian.devel.qa

    Control: reassign -1 ftp.debian.org

    On Fri, 03 Jan 2025 at 15:41:45 +0100, Niels Thykier wrote:
    As suggested by Simon (full context below), lets remove this package now

    The ftp team won't do that until/unless the bug is reassigned to them,
    so I'm doing that now.

    Only one rdeps remains (BTS blocker set, so it will disappear once the fix
    is uploaded).

    I believe this was gst-plugins-bad1.0, which was uploaded today to
    disable the directfb feature.

    Original report quoted below for the ftp team.

    On Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:06:52 +0100 Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> wrote:
    Source: directfb
    Severity: serious
    Justification: ensure visibility for potential adopters
    X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-arm@lists.debian.org, debian-qa@lists.debian.org
    User: debian-qa@lists.debian.org
    Usertags: directfb

    directfb has been unmaintained in Debian since 2018, and its web pages directfb.org and directfb.net seem to have been domain-squatted.

    In practice, DirectFB targeted highly resource-constrained embedded systems, most of which are likely to be no longer relevant: much of the embedded market has been eaten by Android, and outside the Android world the replacement for directfb is typically to use X11, Wayland or maybe KMSDRM, which have an acceptable footprint on modern hardware and make better use of discrete or integrated GPUs.

    There are maintained(?) forks of DirectFB at https://github.com/deniskropp/DirectFB and https://directfb2.github.io/ (possibly others) but as far as I'm aware, nobody is packaging those.

    Typical graphical toolkits like GTK and SDL have generally been removing DirectFB support: it was present (but did not necessarily work well) in
    GTK 2 and SDL 2, and available as a third-party plugin for Qt 4 and 5,
    but seems to have been removed from GTK 3, SDL 3 and Qt 6.

    Older versions of the graphical debian-installer used GTK 2 on DirectFB, but current versions use GTK on X11.

    If nobody is intending to take over maintenance of directfb, is it time
    to remove it from Debian?

    Thanks,
    smcv

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