Re: RM: directfb -- RoQA; RC-buggy, unmaintained

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 <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Source: directfb
> > Severity: serious
> > Justification: ensure visibility for potential adopters
> > X-Debbugs-Cc: [email protected], [email protected]
> > User: [email protected]
> > 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