Re: SDL2 vs SDL3 vs sdl-compat

On 5/12/25 12:14, Rahul Chandra ([email protected] via blfs-dev
Mailing List) wrote:
> Almost none of these packages natively support sdl3, looking at arch
> https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/sdl3/ there is almost
> nothing that can use it. Arch only uses it for sdl2-compat because
> upstream is focusing on that and I think (if I remember a mailing list
> discussion correctly) it was to fix some graphical artifacting and
> performance issues with native sdl3. It could be useful for GLFS, but
> I don't see the point for blfs.

In GLFS, the only use of SDL* is for Wine and proceeding to BLFS. I
believe Steam uses SDL but packages it in its runtime, like GTK and
others, so system-SDL doesn't get picked up.

GLFS in some ways is more update-happy than BLFS, but I don't wanna
break BLFS by updating to SDL3. I could create a sort of demo of what
SDL3 and sdl2-compat installation instructions would look like in
LFS-QOL. It would muddy the waters however.

In short, I don't think SDL3 has a use in GLFS besides being used in
sdl2-compat which can be used by Wine in place of SDL2. And SDL2 in
Wine is meant for things like input and media playback, not rendering
or Matrix computations. Any performances benefits would be lost.

While upstream recommends using SDL3, there really isn't a reason to
until more projects use it, and it's clear that it's going to be
probably a year before important packages start to use it, and maybe
another half for some BLFS packages to come into the fold. So until
upstream stops updating SDL2 and/or something is broken with SDL2 that
won't be fixed, I don't think we should update to the new major quite
yet.

Apologies if my tone came across as harsh! Wasn't my intent but reading
back my email, it doesn't sound friendly LMAO. May just be me though. I
do want to update to SDL3, I just don't see a good reason to quite yet.

- Zeckma

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